Mike Durant

What happens is center of gravity is a huge issue with helicopters.

And it's called the moment of the weight.

So if you think about something balancing, the further away from that balance point, it takes less force.

to move.

So the tail is the furthest from the center of gravity of anything.

So losing that weight, losing the gearbox and the tail itself, now makes that tail super light, which causes the tail to want to go up.

Without changing anything else, the tail now is suddenly going to want to go up.

Well, that's what happened.

So the tail is going up.

So I decel.

What I'm actually trying to do is level the aircraft.

But it's in fact decelerating the aircraft, which then causes the whale tail on a Blackhawk, as people might refer to it, it's called a stabilator.

It's an airfoil on the back, right below the tail rotor, that as you slow down, it comes down.

And what that's designed to do when they first designed the aircraft, when you're decelerating to land, if you didn't have the stabilator back there,

your nose would get too high and you'd have a hard time seeing where you're landing.

So they put that stabilator on there to basically give you

a lift on the tail.

So that's making it even worse.

So now the stabilizer's going down.

The tail's coming up.