"The thing is, helicopters are different from airplanes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly, and if it is not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance, the helicopter stops flying, immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.
This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why, in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed buoyant extroverts and helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to.”
-Harry Reasoner, 1971
(Jcleppe's citing ABC reminds me that some of the more superannuated readers of this thread may remember that Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith were terrific co-anchors of the ABC evening news in the early 1970s. Harry was also a pioneer of 60 minutes.)
ha ha! and the Fokker Eindecker that Max Immelmann (who, it is said, gave his name to the "Blue Max"-the Pour le Mérite-Prussia's highest military honor) flew was VERY different from the Apache helicopter depicted in the video. Interestingly, Immelmann was shot down and killed right after his 17th victory, as he performed a classic "Immelmann" (or reverse turn, NOT the aerobatic maneuver called an Immelmann today). The classic Immelmann is performed by climbing sharply, with the elevators up, stick pulled back, and then, prior to stalling, kicking the rudder over hard to turn the craft over back towards earth in a dive. As the craft turns over, you bring the rudder back towards neutral and this, combined with a hard pull on the stick to keep the elevators up, results in a fairly rapid turn back in the opposite direction to facilitate re-engaging the target. The problem is that at the top of the turn, the aircraft is moving at a much slower speed (nearly stalling) and is therefore vulnerable to any maneuverable enemy aircraft nearby that is moving at speed. It is my understanding that the British aircraft that killed Immelmann was at a higher altitude, flying at speed, and saw Max coming up to make his turn after his 17th kill. As Max's plane slowed just prior to the turn, the British craft dove down on him, guns blazing, and shot him straight out of the sky, and he flew more or less straight in to the ground. They say the wreck was so bad, and his body so mangled, that the first ground troops that came upon the crash site could only identify him based on his monogrammed handkerchief. He was only 25 at the time. When I was much younger, I remember watching in awe as a crop duster went back and forth across the fields, each time doing a reverse turn in just this manner. The old timer I was with at the time, whom I looked up to, told me the pilot was doing "Immelman" turns at the end of each row and then told me a bit of history about how it was named after Max Immelmann, the WW1 ace pilot. He went on to describe the maneuver in detail, explaining how dangerous it was to make that kind of turn so close to the ground; that, due to the fact that the aircraft lost so much airspeed in the turn, you had to be careful not to make the turn without sufficient altitude and time to regain airspeed.
Even though I am just a poor, dumb country boy, I really should know better than to believe everything I have read and everything I remember old timers telling me and thereby avoid making "uninformed and incorrect statements". The Fokker didn't even have ailerons! Roll control was handled by "wing warping" if you can believe that! Comparing a maneuver made by a modern combat helicopter to a maneuver out of common use for nearly a hundred years, made by a comparatively primitive aircraft like the Fokker, was, I admit, foolish, and I deserved the ridicule that resulted.