INTHESPOTLIGHT By Jen Boyer
Claude Vuichard,
President, VRASF The veteran Swiss mountain pilot is changing how aviation approaches emergency procedures.
C
LAUDE VUICHARD HAS SPENT his entire career flying in the challenging environment of the
Swiss Alps, where winds change in the blink of an eye and altitudes limit recovery times when the situation goes south. Through his own brush with a potentially fatal situation, Vuichard discovered a new, safer way to recover from the vortex ring state. Since then, he’s been identifying additional recovery techniques for danger- ous situations. He founded the Vuichard Recovery Aviation Safety Foundation (VRASF) to help spread the word.
ROTOR: Share a little about your flying background. Vuichard: I’ve been flying for more than 25 years for the Swiss government and performing search-and- rescue missions. I started as a flight instructor and then flew many years in high-altitude operations, including rescue missions for Air Zermatt. I built more than 16,000 hours of flight time—some in airplanes, but most in helicopters—in utility, search-and- rescue, and training in the Swiss Alps.
What led you to discover the Vuichard Recovery Technique for recovering from the vortex ring state?
During a logging operation in 1987, I was descending to bring the line into the forest when suddenly the terminal upwind col- lapsed and I went into a vortex ring state (VRS). Somehow, I got out of it before the
16 ROTOR DECEMBER 2022
aircraft hit the trees. I spent the next sev- eral days thinking about it, doing drawings, and trying to discover how to better recover from VRS. In mountain flying, you can’t go forward
to escape VRS the way it had been taught before, because you have the forest and rocks in front of you. In mountain ops, almost all approaches lead to a dead end where an escape to the front is impossible. So I thought, Why not use the tail rotor? In a hover, the tail rotor acts like a pro- peller on a fixed-wing, pulling you to the side. You’re adding cyclic in the opposite direction to hold a hover. If you add more power and release the cyclic, the ship goes sideways, so I was thinking I needed to
“If you apply the Vuichard Recovery whenever you feel a sudden lightness in the seat at low G, you can avoid vortex accidents.”
catch the upwind part of the vortex to get out of the vortex. Of course, sometimes you can go forward to catch it, but what if you can’t go forward? After two nights of making drawings and thinking about this, I went out to test my idea. I put the aircraft into a vortex, then added full power and countertorque with the pedal to maintain heading. I then pushed the cyclic in the opposite direction for a 15- to 20-degree bank, 1 second out, then back. The normal pilot reaction when descending is to pull power and increase
power pedal to maintain the axis. Now, you add 1 second of cyclic to the right for US helicopters, left for rotors that go the other way, then back. This affords a way to avoid the vortex completely as well as recover. Remember, pull the cyclic in the opposite direction of the power pedal. I’m convinced we must have only one
way to avoid and recover from vortex. We’re wired to remember what we learn first—that’s the danger of incorrect train- ing. The Vuichard Recovery Technique works for any kind of hover, even sling loads. If you feel low G at low speed, that means a vortex ring has started. If you apply the Vuichard Recovery whenever you feel a sudden lightness in the seat at low G, you can avoid vortex accidents.
How did you convince the FAA and EASA to accept your technique? Tim Tucker, chief instructor for Robinson Helicopter Co., did much of the work. Tim was the big difference because he put his name on it and talked about it, putting it out in the world. He made numerous presenta- tions at safety seminars around the United States, wrote magazine articles explaining the technique, and, of course, incorporated it into Robinson’s Pilot Safety Course and maneuver guides. The big step came in 2015, when the US Helicopter Safety Team (USHST), con- sisting of representatives from the FAA, helicopter OEMs, and industry, went to Robinson for a meeting and Tim demon- strated the technique to all in attendance, including folks from Airbus, Bell, and Sikorsky. The USHST voted unanimously to
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