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We have lived on a small airport for nearly 25 years. I do not know if many of you remember the gyrocopter craze we had 20 or so years ago. There were lots of them around small airports. They were slow and very noisy. Supposedly if the engine quit you could just autorotate safely to the ground and come in with very slow forward motion. So people thought that they were safe.

So we had this guy who lived across the runway from us who had one. And he seemed to be afraid to leave the pattern with it. So every day he would go round and round the pattern disrupting all the normal air traffic because he was flying about 35 mph while most of the airplanes coming in were doing closer to 100. And when he would go over our house, his unmuffled 4 cylinder engine combined with the helicopter sound of his rotor would just make this god awful noise that irritated the hell out of everyone.

The neighbor who was a Marine and former carrier pilot had been telling me and some others how easy it would be to shoot him down a little earlier in the morning. I was down in our basement and I felt a pretty major vibration and heard a loud boom. I looked out the window and saw what looked like a mini-Hiroshima a few hundred yards away.

My wife went running out the front door along with just about everyone else on the airport. I went to get some garden hose and put on the fire fighter gear I had in the trunk of my car. When she got there the gasoline had all burned up with just a few little spot fires remaining. Someone had thrown a blanket over the body. So she said, “I am a nurse and I need to check to see if he is still alive.” We live with a high percentage of military veterans, so the guys said that he was good and dead. But she insisted and later wished she had not.

The guy had good reason to be nervous about his flying abilities. He had gotten himself into what the authorities later called pilot-induced oscillations. Basically he started going up and down when he was trying to fly straight and level. As he made ever more drastic corrections his head started going up while at the same time the rotor blades were coming down. His seat was several feet ahead of the center of his rotor. He should have had his harness on a little tighter because the blade eventually wacked right through his plastic coated Styrofoam helmet and took the top part of his head off. We were told that it killed him instantly but plowing straight into the ground from several hundred feet sealed the deal.

So everyone was standing around feeling a little sheepish about statements they had made about him in the not so distant past, when our neighbor who lives on the other side of us who is an engineer for the FAA showed up. He said that he was from the FAA and he was taking charge of the scene. Everyone told him to get lost, so he was mad about that for years.