You’re essentially blinded by the dust raised by your rotor wash as you come into ground effect. You simply pick a spot and announce something like “commit, commit, commit” as you drive the helicopter and crew into a huge brown cloud. It’s a controlled crash. If you go too slowly, you brown-out with no way to tell if you’re right side up or wrong side down. If you go too fast, you’ll hammer the aircraft into the ground and break everything that should remain intact. There are no references or signals to help and the folks in the back can’t see any better than you can from the cockpit. You
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