• Question: how high can a helicopter fly and why

    Asked by anon-232895 to Varun, Sammie, Rebecca, Anna, Alin, Adam on 19 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Rebecca Shaw

      Rebecca Shaw answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      I’m not sure about how high they can get up because it might depend on the helicopter make!
      But I know that it’s due to the altitude and the air thinning the higher you go and the helicopters engine not being able to work as safely as they would in more dense air so it can be quite dangerous.

      I know this because when I was in the first year of university I went on an expedition to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. I got to base camp before reaching the summit (which is just under 6000m tall!) and seen a guy who was really sick. All I remember hearing is the guides saying they had to take him back down the mountain before the helicopter could come, so the poor guy had to be helped back down to safer ground for the helicopter to help him because of the altitude and it not being safe.

    • Photo: Samantha Firth

      Samantha Firth answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      Great answer from Rebecca – altitude and air density would definitely play a big part! Helicopters are a bit temperamental – they can only fly in certain conditions so i think it would depend on what the weather was doing first and foremost! I went hiking on a glacier once and we were taken up there by a helicopter. The clouds started to come in and we were told to scramble back to the helicopter as quickly as humanly possible or we’d be stuck up there on the ice overnight!

    • Photo: Varun Ramaswamy

      Varun Ramaswamy answered on 20 Nov 2019:

      Rebecca is right about air density. The weight of the helicopter and the span of its rotors are also very important factors because the spinning rotors create a vortex that helps the air from underneath them lift up the helicopter against its weight.

      In an aeroplane, the wings create that lifting effect and since the wings of a plane span longer than the rotors of a helicopter, they can fly higher than helicopters.

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