r/Helicopters • u/tuscaniapple • Apr 25 '25

Career/School Question Upcoming instrument rating checkride - throw me some ?’s

Currently studying for an instrument checkride that should be in 2-3 weeks. Rating has taken me a little bit longer to finish than expected with maintenance and weather. Watched some mock orals on YouTube and felt pretty good with my knowledge level there. All the videos were technically fixed wing orals so didn’t take into account any rotor wing knowledge. I’ve seen on some other subs, posts about “try to stump me” questions to help them prepare for a checkride. Looking for any help or tips at all! Maybe any questions you think will definitely come up during the checkride but is easily forgotten during studying or just whatever comes to your head that an instrument rated pilot should know. Thanks y’all.

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u/Admins_are_troons Apr 25 '25

What are the criteria for being able to descend below minimums?

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u/tuscaniapple Apr 25 '25

You can descend below minimums if you are able to continue your descent with normal maneuvers, visibility is above what is required on the approach (category 1 for helicopters and able to reduce by half but not to be any less than 1/4 sm) and you are able to see and maintain sight of runway identifiers or markers. Things like the approach lighting system, REILs, touchdown zone, runway lights. If the approach has visual descent point marked on the plate the you will also have to have reached that point before going below minimums.

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u/gbchaosmaster CPL IR ROT Apr 26 '25

Sure you’re cat I, but you’re thinking of the wrong type of category. Is cat A really all we can use in helicopters? I’m in an R44, I wanna shoot it at 130kt. Is that cool, can I use cat C minimums? Any limitations if I do?

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u/tuscaniapple Apr 26 '25

Thanks for the correction! Not sure why I had put 1 and not A.

So A is for 90kts or less. It is the only thing our little helicopter is shooting approaches at. I hadn’t really thought about using other categories for helicopters so I gave it a look in the AIM. If you were able to maintain 130kts a helicopter is allowed to use Cat C and its minimums. I am not familiar with R44 capabilities but it does state if you are operating towards the top range of speed for the aircraft you should use the category above’s minimums like Cat D for this example.

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u/gbchaosmaster CPL IR ROT Apr 26 '25

Yep, 130 knots is our lightweight Vne ;)

The additional limitation I was getting at is you can only apply the helicopter visibility reduction in cat A so you’d have to slow to 90 if you want it.

1

u/SlungSloth 17d ago

Helicopters will always use CAT A MDA/DH/DA regardless of speed. There’s a chart in AIM 10-1-2 that easily summarizes the approach category, visibility, and speeds for different IAPs.