Love Is A Blood Red MBB BO105
Captain Bill Day - Wanaka - New Zealand
The year was 2012 and the high places of the south island echoed with fresh sounds of praise. Where five blades floated in articulation and two blades once teetered, a rasp of rigidity shredded dense mountain air calling the faithful to worship the virtues of a pure Germanic heritage. Across fiord, plain and granite walls a blood red Bolkow 105 navigated impervious to the air currents and machinations of winter and summer. In command, a prophet pilot, a voice in the wilderness calling to question the faithful who worship in three dimensions.
His name is Bill. This is his testimony.
I think that people get put off the BO105 because the whole twin thing scares them. I guess the first thing that people need to understand is that a single engine failure in a twin helicopter is a very different event from a single engine failure in a twin fixed wing because there is no asymmetry of thrust. It is a benign event that does not require any extraordinary handling skills on the part of the pilot. You really only know that it has happened because the alarms are going off.
I believe that you need to be disciplined in flying take-offs and approaches from and to a confined helipad because we have double the chance of an engine failure but by flying the profile in those moments, we can reduce the consequences to zero. It is a real Category A machine. It has just gone through a thousand years of flying without a rotor system failure!!!
I don’t know how I could buy a safer machine.
The other important point about the BO105 is that it is very easy to fly. The extra gearbox that puts the tail rotor at the same height as the main rotor means that the roll component has been taken out of the hover. It is ridiculously stable in the hover. The additional horsepower available flatters the pilot.
An additional point and you would understand this better than me, is that a private owner is lucky to do 200 hours per year. It does not fly much so the BO105 has very little on calendar time and lots of “on-condition” compared to other helicopters. Its operating costs for a single private pilot are not a horror show.
Bill Day, New Zealand 2018