Machine? When you're up there in an open framework with nothing around you but air, you feel like a bird By ROBERT GANNON SO ee Cun cd ove ure ti ad Petree Una fest cm kuna aWith scrounged material, you can build a Pp: Sunday started building his flying ‘machine one fall, out in the yard. Then, as the days grew cold, he moved the whole business into the tiny kitchen of his house trailer. During the winter, when his wife complained about having to eat in the liv- ing room, Paul Sunday would square his thin frame and say, “Americans are d tined to fly. I don’t want to miss out on it Today he has his dream. Paul Sunday, Chesapeake and Ohio railroad conductor and grandfather three times over, is flying his contraption through the rolling hills of Indiana, and the homefolk of the town of Peru just can’t get over the idea. Old Paul has taken to the skies in what looks like an airborne Erector set. The machine that lifts Sunday heaven- ward is just one of some 1,500 helicopter- like aircraft buzzing the U.S. countryside. They're called Gyrocopters or, without en- gines (towed by cars or boats), Gyro- gliders. As one grinning pilot, a’ retired milkman, put it, “It sounds corny, I know, but when you're way up there in that open framework with the wind flapping your ears and there’s nothing around you but air, you honestly feel that you're a bird.” Some one-man-copter buffs design their own rigs. Most follow tested plans or build them from semi-kits. By either method, the typical Gyrocopter looks like an out- size tricycle with a ceiling fan whirling ‘A Gyroglider (without engine) looks ike this from the ground at the end of a tow rope tied to a car. 92 | POPULAR SCIENCE ir: If the wind is brisk, you need no tow—just lash your line to @ post, atop. The cockpit is an open bucket seat bolted to a trellis of aluminum. The power comes from a 72-hp. engine usually snitched from a worn-out Air Force target drone. The tail looks like an afterthought. Easy and cheap. Why are so many would-be pilots getting the bug to build their own hedgehoppers? The machines are comparatively easy to build, easy to fly, relatively safe, and cheap. With scrounged-together material, you can build one for $300 or less; with new everything, $735 plus engine ($995). This compares with a cost of maybe $5,000 for a small plane, a minimum of $20,000 for a com- mercial helicopter. Sixty-year-old J. D. Lay of Santa Clara, Calif., put his together, with the help of his wife “who held the parts while I hand- set the rivets,” with only two electric drills in the way of power tools. Sixteen-year-old Danny Cudney of Raleigh, youngest li- censed Gyrocopter pilot, built his with the help of his father in the garage. Like the old Autogiro invented by Juan de la Cierva, a Spaniard, early in the 1920s, a Gyrocopter gets its lift from a canopy of whirling blades. In that respect, it’s like a helicopter. But unlike a helicopter, a Gyro- copter’s blades are not powered. They are free-wheeling. They rotate because an en- gine and conventional propeller drive the craft forward. They also rotate from an Continued Pilot controls are simple. Last year an 11-year-old soloed a Gyroglider at Raleigh-Durham airport.Gyrocopter in your garage for $300 or less Complete kit for a Gyrocopter is shown abo and range up to $735 for a full aircraft. They the engine is missing. The assembled job do not include engine because many builders prefer |. Kits start at $59 for individual rotor to shop surplus lots nearby or by mail. APRIL 1966 | 93accommodating upward rush of wind incident to descent. | Today's Gyrocopters conventionally have two blades 20 feet long that swoosh around at 400 r.p.m. Their operation is simplicity itself. To quote from a PoruLar Science story 12 years ago—and the principle hasn't changed a whit today: ‘The blades are mounted on a single bearing that lets them teeter-totter in rotating. The teeter-tottering, plus manipulation of the control yoke, balances out the lift of the blade advancing into the wind (toward the line of flight) and the lift of the blade retreating from the wind. ‘. Without such compensation the machine would tend to Engine frequently is a surplus capsize—the advancing blade creates more lift.” four-banger built for the Air Force Flying the Gyrocopter. To get going, the pilot flip to power a radio-controlled tar- starts his prop, hops into the seat, and then reaches up get Price: as little as $149. and heaves the rotor to a spin. ‘Then he revs up the engine and heads into the wind. By the time he has scooted 100 to 500 feet, the wind has whipped the rotor to lift speed, and, buzzing like an angry gnat, the craft sails upward. Most of these flying bedsteads cruise at around 60 m.p.h. (maximum: 85-plus), carry enough gas for an hour and a half, cost somewhere around $3 an hour to fly, can climb high enough so that the pilot requires oxygen, and, faced with a wind of 20 mph., can be made to hover. In pilots’ parlance, the craft is extremely “forgiving’—if you make a poor maneuver (bank too steeply, for example) you can take pressure off the con- trols and the machine will pretty much balance itself. That's because the craft hangs like a pendulum beneath the disk made by the rotating wing. Most people learn this kind of flying by starting out in a rotary-wing craft with no engine at all—called by Igor Bensen, a pioneer in the field, a Gyroglider. Gyro- gliders must be towed unless there is a brisk wind. At Bensen’s manufacturing plant, in Raleigh, N.C., I took my first trip recently, tucked beside Bensen in a Instrumentation on this Gyro in- double-seat job. ae The first thing you're aware of is the rotor swishing altimeter, compass. tur inches from your head, like a scythe through grass. You bank Incicator, speed indicators. ‘see the tow car a hundred feet ahead as the little craft bumps forward on its foot-high wheels. The rotor swooshes faster until it is a circular blur. Speed hits 20 m.p.h., but in the wide-open framework, it seems like 80. Then, suddenly, the ground drops out from under you. The wind sucks tears from your eyes, whistles up your pants legs. Far below, the tow car gets smaller and smaller. Then you remember how every gyro pilot talks about birds, and all of a sudden you know why. You learn to fly a Gyroglider in slow, simple steps. First you taxi, pulled along by a car going about 10 m.p-h., and learn to balance on the two wheels. Then, with the auto traveling just a little faster than takeoff eI speed, you practice little hops, rising no higher than five Rotor head, oftetertotter type, eet 0F 80. You do this in half-hour stretches over five or Rotor head, of tester ‘over yee six days, getting the feel of the hanging control yoke that Gimbels permit hands-off fight. changes’ the rotation plane of the swirling, overhead Blades are plywood and steel. [Continued on page 220] 94 | POPULAR SCIENCE rrIs This Every Man's Flying Machine? [Continued from page 94] rotor. Then you rise to the limit of the rope. You find that when you push the yoke sidewise the rotor tips and you move in the opposite direction. You learn that by work- ing the pedals you swivel the rudder to more positively swing you around. Push the yoke forward, and the rotor tips back- ward and the gyro climbs, Pull the yoke back, and the rotor tilts forward and the gyro glides. Then you cut loose from the tow car and make several low-altitude free-flight land- ings to make sure both you and the ma- chine are ready for powered flight. Your confidence builds, and slowly your hops lengthen until one day you set your jaw, twist the motorcycle-like handle grip on a gasoline-powered version full open, and rise into the sky. A safe, soft landing. One comforting thing about gyro-ing is the knowledge that if the motor cuts out (or the rope breaks) you settle to earth, rotor whirring, soft as a double-bladed maple seed. For proof, look at Jim Simmons, an X-ray technician from Loma Linda, Calif., who built a mo- torless rig in his garage. On his second towed flight, the rope broke. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when that line dropped away,” he said later. “But I settled down nice as anything.” Dr. H. B. Monroe, president of Wayne Technical Institute in Goldsboro, N.C., says, “We live in a world that has largely deprived us of the joy of using our hands. With this thing, a man can take his hands and use them to make something exciting.” Dr. Monroe built his own machine in his school office. Its qualities make it perfect for outdoors- men. This spring, when Joe McMillan, a rancher from Arthur, Neb., turned his 110 head of cattle out to pasture, somehow they disappeared. McMillan strapped him- self into his Gyrocopter, used a country road for takeoff, and buzzed into the sky to check his 1,800 acres. A half-hour later he spotted where winter snow drifts had mashed down a fence. “It would have taken me all day in a Jeep to find that break,” he said later. In Nevada, an archeologist specializing in Indian relics, spies likely looking sites from the air. In the Philippines, a mis- sionary uses a Gyrocopter to island-hop on 220 | POPULAR SCIENCE his rounds. In Peru, along a stretch of the Andes, a plantation owner uses his rig to visit a field on the other side of a mountain ridge. Takes him a half-hour to get there. By auto, it’s a three-day trip. Gyrocopters are mostly for fun, though. Which is just as well with the Federal Aviation Agency, aircraft-licensing agency. As the rules are now written, you can’t use Gyrocopters for any real purpose—only for kicks. And that makes Bensen furious. “That's just one more place where the F.A.A. goofed,” he says. Man behind the machine. Bensen, 48, is the driving force behind the whole Gyro- copter movement. As president of Bensen Aircraft, maker of Gyrocopters, kits, and parts, he not only sells the most popular craft, he coined the term Gyrocopter. A full-faced man with pixie-pointed eyebrows, Bensen speaks like a North Carolinian brought up in Russia, which he is, and his cohorts call him “the Bela Lugosi of the gyro circuit.” Today Bensen estimates his company comers about 90 percent of the Gyroplane market, selling $1.4 million worth of cop- ters and parts annually. Gyrocopters are classified “experimental.” This means, in part, that 1) the pilot must have a Student's Pilot Certificate, which he gets after a medical exam by his family physician and a talking-to by the F.A.A.; 2) the craft must be checked over by a local F.A.A. representative; and 3) it must have been constructed by the hobbyist—he can’t pick it up ready-made at the factory. (He can buy the parts, though—a complete rotor, for example.) The touch of danger is lurking even though the device is aerodynamically about the safest aircraft around. In the past 13 years, according to Igor Bensen, a dozen people have been killed flying Gyrocopters. But, he points out, 24 sky divers were killed last year, and four skateboard riders died in a three-month period in 1965. Despite the casualties, the safety record of Gyrocopters is, on the whole, good. Tf the F.A.A. does indeed open wide the door, the boom in back-yard gyro-ing should be impressive. At least 150,000 people—more than enough to fill a city the size of Austin, Tex.—are already interested enough to have paid hard cash for gyro plans from Bensen. Col