The Engine Failed- Now What?

“The prizes go to those who meet emergencies successfully. And the way to meet emergencies is to do each daily task the best we can.” William Feather

A hallmark warning sign of impending doom is silence.

Since most have not had the misfortune of having a helicopter strapped to their backside during an engine failure, I’ll do my level best to take you there. I have a bit of experience with this subject. More on that later.

To set the stage, think of the environment this way. In every place we live, work, and play, there is a background level of noise. If you’re flying a helicopter, there is quite a bit of noise. Noise is your friend.

It’s a lot like an office. The background noise of computers humming, printers printing, phones ringing- you get the picture.

Whether you’re in a helicopter thousands of feet in the air or in an office banging away on a keyboard, finishing a time-sensitive, lengthy masterpiece for your boss, the immediate sound of a power failure ushers in deafening silence.

The sweat that beads up on your forehead and the pit in your stomach appears instantly.

The entire sequence can be very similar to your health. Hopefully it ends with the same efficiency- the actual emergency or diagnosis, arresting the descent with a well-executed plan, making a successful termination or landing, capped off with a full power recovery.

But it all begins when things get really quiet.

Like cholesterol last week, let’s stay out of the weeds when discussing the aerodynamics of helicopters. Let’s just say a helicopter is the incredible design of an aircraft that by all accounts, should not be able to fly.

Better said, helicopters don’t fly, they just beat the air into submission. Just like an airplane uses engines and wings for power to create lift, helicopters use engines and turning rotor blades to do the same thing.

When airplanes lose power, they rely on the wings to provide the lift necessary to ultimately glide to the ground. When helicopters lose engine power, the blades want to stop turning and the helicopter acts like the anvil Wiley Coyote is dropping on the Roadrunner.

It’s a lead balloon falling to the earth in what we hope is a controlled crash.

That’s the end of the aerodynamics class.

In the cases of both an in-flight emergency and your health (gut health for our discussion), you have to identify the emergency. The speed it takes to identify the problem goes a long way in determining the outcome.

In the case of a helicopter, the quicker you identify the problem, the greater the chance you can harness the energy of the spinning rotor blades to remain aloft. With regard to your health, the quicker you can identify the illness or condition, the better your chances for a favorable outcome, or outright survival.

In both cases, you are a player in the game of fight or flight, literally.

The technical term for unpowered flight in a helicopter is “autorotation”. Since we’re staying out of the weeds, here’s a simple explanation.

You have to quickly enter a transition, replacing the lost engine power turning the blades during powered flight, to using your existing speed, pitch (attitude) of the nose of the helicopter, and left or right direction of the body of the helicopter (trim) to control your entry to unpowered flight.

Imagine you’re on a string stretching from the helicopter at altitude to mother earth, with a varying degree of “steepness”, directly proportional to how quickly and efficiently you make this transition.

The similarity to a health problem is uncanny. It’s pretty simple, the quicker you identify a health problem, the better chance for success and less exposure to the damaging effects from disease.

The analogy of the imaginary string applies the same way. You’re in a descent. The “steepness” and speed of the controlled crash is dependent on how quickly you make entry, the diagnosis in this comparison.

I use the term “controlled crash” because that’s essentially what it is. After making a timely entry to this new state of flight, there needs to be a level of skill to keep the descent under control.

Think of the challenge of patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, only the stakes are a bit higher when you fail. You have to maintain a descent posture and rotor speed that allows you to reach an open spot of land.

This is the biggest advantage to being in a helicopter versus an airplane. When Captain “Sully” Sullenberger had to put his commercial airplane into the Hudson River, if he was in a helicopter, he could have stuck his landing on a dry piece of land, the size of a postage stamp in comparison.

Or as we used to say in the helicopter world, “we don’t need no stinking runways”.

Thankfully, neither did Sully.

With regard to a health emergency or scare, the skill and controlled descent is the care plan you and your medical team implement. The varying degree of illness severity will dictate the skill and help required to control your descent during this phase.

To this point we’re in our controlled descent and we’re approaching the ground. As the saying goes in all aviation, “takeoffs are optional, landings are mandatory”.

If we’ve done everything right to this point, we have maintained the required speed in our rotor blades, the aircraft is in a good position, and we’re going to “apply the brakes” as we approach the ground.

In a helicopter, we’re going to use the “pitch” of the blades to “pump the brakes” and arrest our descent.

Here’s the challenge. Imagine you’re driving a car, and you only have one pump of your brakes to slow your car before losing all of your brake fluid and hitting a brick wall. This one pump needs to be applied at exactly the right time, with exactly the right pressure, for exactly the right duration to stop just short of the wall.

Or else…

That’s the task at hand when using the pitch of rotor blades to arrest your descent. But once you use it up, that’s all there is.

You have one pump of the proverbial brakes and the ground is the brick wall.

When it comes to health, our challenge is also arresting the descent. We’re working our medical plan to arrest our descent from illness to health. The analogy is the same and the consequences can be just as drastic.

Often when a condition is diagnosed, the recovery also has the equivalent of one pump of the brakes. Hopefully that’s not the case, but often it is.

I saved the best part for last. I’ve never experienced an actual engine failure that required a termination to the ground. I had the luxury (and good fortune) to be able to rely on multiple engines for most of my aviation career.

Termination is the term we use to describe the end of the maneuver. In an actual emergency, termination occurs on the ground after the ballet dance I just described. In training, we terminate the autorotation to a hover above the ground while simultaneously executing an engine(s) power recovery.

This is the exact outcome we’re striving for in any health issue. After a successful identification, entry, and controlled descent, we terminate the maneuver with a full power recovery.

In the world of gut health, this can range from cases like mine, an actual emergency to a simulated emergency of sorts, requiring a less dramatic restoration from poor gut health.

The latter is preferred for sure.

We’ll talk about a food diary. I don’t use a food diary on a regular basis, but completing this exercise just once can go a long way to achieving your gut health goals. It has worked for me on more than one occasion.

Thanks for reading,

Jeff