Composite Blades in Rain

Jason312

Newbie
Joined
Mar 18, 2019
Messages
30
Location
RICHMOND, Ut
Total Flight Time
1760
Hello,
I recently spoke to someone selling AutoGyro's who is also a composites engineer and he stated that composite blades while superior to aluminum blades in many ways cannot be flown in the rain because they will deteriorate.
Do those of you with composite blades never fly in rain? What do you do to protect them? Nickel leading edge?

Thanks,
Jason
 
While I do not like to fly in the rain in an open-cockpit gyro, I have done it any number of times, with no noticeable effect other than it helps in cleaning the bugs off.
Magni just says, "Extended flying in heavy rain conditions may cause wear of the paint on the end of the rotor's and propeller's leading edges." It doesn't seem like a major worry.
 
Can some sort of leading edge protective strip be applied or is it just not that big of a deal?

When I was deployed to Iraq/Afghanistan we would spray paint the leading edges of the blades often to protect them from the dust. Probably not the prettiest thing but the BlackHawk wasn't meant to look pretty :)
 
If you tend to do a lot of long cross country trips, at some point you may run into some unexpected showers and have to either fly out of it or land. I don’t think there is anything that can be done to protect the painted edges without changing the balance. Props tend to be effected much more if they are painted or don’t have a metal edge. Rain will take off the varnish on the edge of a wood prop too. Had that happen on my wood prop on my Cub when It started to rain as I tried to land when flying in Central PA.

Rain does’t hurt the bare aluminum rotors or metal props.

Dave
 
Tyger - When you flew in the rain did you hear the rotor hit the rain drops? It’s an odd sound when flying through the heavier rain.
 
DavePA11;n1143839 said:
Rain does’t hurt the bare aluminum rotors or metal props.

That all depends on how much you encounter, how often, and for how long. It can chew up the tips, with the high speed impact acting as if you were doing hydraulic mining. To see an extreme example of damage potential, look at what spray to does to seaplane props (it isn't pretty).
 
Dave, actually the last time I flew through some (light) rain everything got really quiet! The usual wush-wush-wush sound just went away, until I flew out of it and everything dried off, then it went back to normal. That was the only time I noticed that effect, and I'm still not quite sure why it happened.
I've never noticed any "impact" noises flying through heavier stuff but, that said, I have a hard time hearing anything but the loudest external sounds when I have my headset on and the motor running. Is yours a composite rotor or metal, I can't remember.
 
It was on aluminum rotors, and I wasn’t wearing helmet at the time. It was big drops too. It was rain cloud not on the weather map. I turned around and went around it. Think Barry was flying with me at the time, and the AR-1 rotors are fine with rain since they are bare metal. I don’t think rain would hurt the wrap blades either.

Thanks WaspAir, I wasn’t aware of that.
 
I recall when Norman Surplus started his epic journey in a MTOsport around the world back in 2010 there was another guy from US who got a Magni M16 and chased Norman without any public noise nor media coverage. Rumour was that while entering Cambodia airspace that guy tried to poke through a massive tropical rain and got his composite Magni rotor so seriously damaged that he dropped his gyro near famous Angkor Wat temple complex and got out of the race.
I saw some times composite and wooden props damaged by rain.
3M prop guard tape serves well against this danger. But there are some more reasons to avoid entering rain for most cases. One is that sometimes rain area that you consider (while boldly approaching to it) consisting of small water drops can easily appear to be hail drops which can damage many critical parts of the gyro in few seconds, i.e. prop, canopy or windshield etc.
And yes, rain makes a gyro flying worse since 1) water drops extract kinetis energy from rotor which needs to add power 2) drops distort rotor blade airfoil which again turns in additional power consumption. All in all gyro continues to fly but needs more notably more power. Which also shortens your range ;)
 
Hail is always associated with very strong convective updrafts, as in thunderstorms. If you find yourself in that sort of situation, you have a lot more concerns than just what form the precipitation is taking..
 
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