Me too. How is my wife ever going to fit that under the tree? I’d better just go get it now to save her the hassle.
Fuck it. I’m getting one.
Be nice to your next-of-kin and keep the life insurance current.
Given the rarity of the Category (gyroplane vs airplane, helicopter, glider, balloon, powered parachute, etc), the number (12) is significant.
Mainly because they are cheap and easy to built.
Note: the Make/Model for a homebuilt commonly has the builder’s name as the “Make” - because it is the builder who is shown as the manufacturer.
Fatal* gyroplane accidents 1/1/10 - 1/1/15 Total: 12
-
- Does not include accidents in which nobody died. There were 21 non-fatal in the same period.
I don’t know about the specific post you were responding to. It sounds like the thing barely gets out of ground effect! Could be a weight issue. But rotorcraft do have an issue with (actually) high altitude.
You know that an airplane flies faster the higher it goes, because you need X amount of air flowing over the wings to maintain height. Since air is less dense the higher you go, you need to go faster to get the lift you need. With a rotorcraft, you’ve always got a ‘wing’ going backwards. So the higher the forward speed, the lower the airspeed of the retreating blade. So the higher a rotorcraft goes, the slower its airspeed must be to prevent retreating blade stall.
I tell people the first four weeks of the month are the busiest at my job. I don’t have much time to watch the news, and have to pick up stuff through osmosis as the continuous loop plays. So I haven’t paid much attention to this incident. Is the gyroplane an ultralight, or was is registered? If it’s an ultralight, and if I heard correctly that the pilot was being charged for flying without a license, I don’t see how that would stand. You don’t need a license to fly an ultralight. If it’s registered, then I can see such enforcement action. Of course, you don’t need to intend to break any rules. ‘Lawnchair Larry’ claimed he did not intend to fly his contraption, but he still violated rules he didn’t even know existed (since he wasn’t a pilot) and he faced enforcement actions.
So, one every six months give or take.
Think about this. How many small aircraft like a Cessna or an Ultralight have you seen flying in your lifetime? Now how many gyros have you seen in that time frame?
The number of flying gyros is a TINY fraction of the general aviation/ultralight number.
Now do the math. The gyro accident rate is horrendous.
There WAS A gyro instructor. I say WAS because the FAA finally pulled his card. Something like a DOZEN of his students have crashed and died. And this guy taught in some Podunk town in the rural deep south. How many people do you think he has taught? Compare that some run of the mill general aviation instructor.
I used to follow a gyro forum. For a 4 year period or so they had an active member dying every six months or so. The number of “active” members was probably a 100 give or take a factor of 2 (and I am being generous here). Being an astronaut or BASE jumper or probably about any other dangerous thing humans do was safer than that group of yahoos.
Get educated, be conservative, understand the physics and limitations, and avoid the idiots who will lure you to your untimely death.
If someone tries to sell you a RAF gyro or tell you that horizontal stabilizers aren’t required or center line thrust vs high line thrust is an aerodynamic choice, kick the bastard in the nuts and run the other way.
Ironically, the only gyro I’ve actually seen flying was one where the pilot was on his way to a crash in a local swamp that killed him.
Most gyros ever flown were home built and even the factory models were poorly designed. Their use is almost always predicated on their lower cost compared to light planes and helicopters. A properly design gyro would require a long tail, large control services, larger rotors with at least collective control and ideally cyclic control to reduce the effects of PIO. But adding those features would make a gyro cost more than conventional airplanes while still being less stable in flight. That would eliminate their appeal.
In addition, gyros are not short take off aircraft unless they have a fully powered rotor start up. Small pre-rotators reduce the takeoff distance to that of light planes optimized for STOL, and with no pre-rotator they need nearly twice the distance for takeoff to get the rotor up to speed. This is sometimes done by traveling down the runway from the far end to get the rotor up to speed and then turning around for the actual take off run. They can land nearly vertically with a head wind but that in itself is also dangerous and attempting that accounts for many of the crashes.
When I was a kid in the early-'70s, I thought the McColloch J-2 was one of the coolest aircraft on the ramp where my mom worked.
Another rough stat I remembered (though my memory may be faulty)
There used to be a yearly “Benson Days”. Somewhere out in California IIRC. Named for Igor Benson who popularized cheap gyrocopter flying for the masses. Bunch of gyro enthusiasts would gather for a long weekend / week of fun and flying in the desert.
IIRC it was pretty much a given on any year that someone would die at the fly in. And for that matter, again IIRC, sometimes MORE than one would.
These things weren’t Oshcosh (sp?) or the SunNfun in Florida.
Again, IIRC the number of flyers at these things was 400 ish (again a factor of two either way and probably being generous here too).
Think about those numbers.
Hole ee crap.
Probably a weight issue, or a design issue, because I have known gyro pilots who, as I said, didn’t have an issue with getting thousands of feet above the ground when they wanted to do so.
This is always a sticky point.
I’m not clear myself on whether or not the gyro than landed on the Capitol lawn was registered or not. I don’t recall seeing a tail number on it when pictured by the media, and that style is very much like the ultralight gyros I’ve seen in real life, so it could, actually, be an ultralight.
If it is an ultralight is could be dinged as an “unregistered aircraft” in two ways: one, if it’s overweight for a Part 103 UL then it’s not legally an ultralight and will be penalized as an unregistered aircraft because it’s supposed to be legally registered and N-numbered. The other way this could happen is if the UL is taken into airspace off limits to UL’s (which DC definitely is) in which case, again, you’re violating Part 103.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned 007’s friend “Little Nell”. I think it was the only vehicle Bond ever used that he managed to return to Q in pristine condition.
Probably, because out of everything Bond ever used, DINGED would mean DEAD (and that includes Space Shuttles).
Small single-engine aircraft? Thousands.
Autogyros? Four powered. One glider.
True.
To be fair, that’s NOT just because of poor design/construction. Rotorcraft of any sort are inherently unstable (although some high end designs have come up with tech solutions for some of the worst of it) and flying them requires different and more learning than fixed wing. Rotorcraft are not as safe as fixed wing aircraft, even if the high-end rotorcraft are pretty reasonably safe due to engineering and pilot training.
For example - there are NUMEROUS cases of a completely untrained person suddenly in charge of a fixed-wing airplane bringing it to a survivable landing in an emergency by being “talked down” or even figuring it out on their own. So far as I know, there are NO such cases for any rotorcraft (if that is incorrect please describe the incident, I’d be fascinated to know about one).
Now, add in minimal (if that) pilot training AND crappy design and you’ll get an idea why the gyro safety record is so appalling.
When I was involved in ultralights (gosh, twenty years ago now!) I knew a couple of actual autogyro pilots. The leader of the informal group was a gent from Puerto Rico who had hundreds of hours in his homebuilt with no history of crashing, which was quite remarkable… but he had had his upgraded to a certified engine, registered as an experimental aircraft, and had a private pilot license (rotorcraft). He’s also the guy who owned the gryoglider. Basically an exception to the usual UL gyro pilot, given the better machine and better training. One of the other guys was a fixed-wing pilot (also with a private license) interested in rotorcraft. He went on to get a commercial rotorcraft rating and is now a commercial helicopter pilot and instructor in Arizona. So there ARE some competent guys in the gyro world, but they tend to be a grade or two up from pure ultralights and flying larger, heavier, better designed machines that are official aircraft.
Yeah, other gyro guys I’d met/heard of in the area didn’t last long, as in, either crashed and died or got scared and stopped flying gyros.
Over the years, ultralights/kits/sport aircraft have improved in both design and safety, but it’s still not as safe as conventional aviation, even the single engine fixed wing general aviation.
IMO:
Auto Gyro’s are like the ones from the thirties. Airframe from or like a normal aircraft, definitely not ultralights.
Gyro copters are the little ones & usually homemade. ( Ultralights )
Let me give you guys and gals some insight into how retarded the gyro community is.
There is still to this day a ragging debate over the need(or not) for Center Line Thrust (CLT) and or (mostly both) horizontal stabilizers.
Now lets skip over some basic gyro physics and equate it to something that the average wing jockey can understand.
How would you feel about the following?
There is a nice airplane design. Looks all fancy and shit. But it has a feature/flaw.
The tail section can/will stall before the front wings do. And once they do, you’ll flip over backwards and the wings will rip off. And this all happens in less than two seconds. Now if you are really fast you can thrust the stick forward and cut the engine throttle and you might save your bacon. But your total reaction time needs to be a second or less.
Oh, and this rear stall can happen due to a wind gust or down draft or a poorly executed maneuver or you just not minding the stick.
Any airplane that had that feature was probably laughed off the drawing board not long after Orville and Willbur took flight.
In the gyro community its still a controversy and a lifestyle choice.
Again:
If a Benson product - then “gyrocopter”
If FAA - then “gyroplane”
“Autogyro” = “gyroplane”, but was used in the 1930’s to describe a heavy, certificated (yes, that is the term) gyroplane. Term rarely used in aviation today.
So a Bensen Gyrocopter is a gyroplane, just as a Chevy is an automobile. It could also be properly called an autogyro.
I remember the weekend event that thing had at MYF, sorry, KMYF. They were giving free rides in it to anyone brave enough to trust it. Bert, the resident aviation geru, took one, and when he returned I asked him what he thought of it. Needless to say, Bert, a 19,000 hour pilot looked at me and said something that rhymed with “niece of spit.” I never took my free ride.
Is he using his feet?
No. :eek: