Maintenance crew chief: "What are you doing?"

Why is it when I'm done with rearm/refuel that the ground crew always says "What are you doing?" when I start rolling or taking off?

I could switch the radio back to the tower and not hear the complaints... :smilewink:

I could understand the tower complaning that I did not ask for clearance.

Alright, thank you.

I guess there's a light outside the helicopter to signal the ground crew the position of my switch. Or they use hand gestures. Or else, how do they coordinate connection/disconnection of this wire? (just thinking outloud)

The doc does not mention it. Since they programmed this feature, it should be mentionned.

"НОП" (Ground crew intercom) – used to communicate with ground crew through the wired telephone. When rearming or refueling at an airfield or FARP, you will need to select this setting to communicate with the ground crew unless the cockpit door is open and the rotors are not turning.

Then, "intercom source selector" the has two functions:

1) selects the intercom source - duh!

2) makes the ground crew connect/disconnect

I don't think it's very realistic, as I can flip the switch to VHF and take off a millisecond later without having the guy complain. Well, I'm guessing he's not complaining, since I can't hear him anymore!

If a tree falls in the forest... does it make a noise? Who cares?

So I guess I should not care if the ground crew is complaining, but I can't hear it... :)

:) hmm crew chiefs that get that kind of behaviour from pilots might forget to pull the pins from the bang seat ;)

Yes, what he said. :) In other words, just switching the intercom to the "НОП" position by itself doesn't do much, to talk to the ground crew they need to be plugged in. In order to simulate this, it is assumed that when you switch the intercom to "НОП", the ground crew plugs in, and when you switch back to one of your other radios, they unplug and move away.

Out of interest, why do they need to use a cable to communicate with the pilot? The tower communicates just fine with the pilot over radio. Why don't the ground crew just chat to the cockpit via a regular radio?

A few reasons I can see:

Shorter calls; no need to use callsigns.

Less radio frequencies to be assigned.

Less chance of mixup in radio frequencies.

Reliability.

Any real Army chopper pilots care to comment?

I'm not a "real army chopper pilot", but after bringing me along for a visit to the local airport tower my flight instructor mentioned the extreme brevity that even civilian ATC staff will be trained in (at least here) in the case of them getting put into military service in a war. Our standard over here is (apparently) that anything that doesn't absolutely have to be radio is not done over radio, and a typical aircraft-ATC takeoff clearance can be akin to "Green 34 starting" and then the controller either says a simple "yes" or "no".

This to limit as far as possible the ability of an enemy to home in on the transmissions to find the base (our air force war doctrine is entirely based on dispersal, where regular roads will be used as runways - which roughly becomes equivalent to the FARP system often used by attack helicopters).

So I'd add OPSEC/EMCON to the possible reasons, and then stand in line to wait for comment from one of the real army pilots.

I could be and probably am completely off-base here, but I seem to recall seeing a video once of a pilot of a jet going through their standard pre-flight checklist. Part of this was them telling their crew chief which control he was about to move and what its visible effects should be; the ground crew would then move to where he/she could see the relevant control surface and repeat what the pilot was about to do; and then the pilot would do it and they'd confirm the control surface moved as expected.

I think this was repeated for pretty much everything that had some kind of externally-visible effect, e.g. lighting.

If that's the case, then it would make sense to use wired comms for such a lengthy procedure, since radios would need to have frequencies allocated and there's the risk of accidentally using the wrong one, enemies being able to use it to their advantage, and the simple fact that radios need batteries which adds yet another straw to the logistic camel's back.

In a combat situation you might need to take off in a hurry and do a minimal pre-flight check, but most combat missions are scheduled to give the pilot time to fully check over their ship.

Fair enough, good answers, thanks!