Homemade Helicopter by 102 year old Boeing Engineer

https://youtu.be/oB9EYOtCOYs ^ | Mar 9, 2021 | Carson Thompson

[Steve Van Doorn]

NO MASK!!! That old man is going get the coof and die I tell you!! /s <— do I need to put this here really?

[llevrok]

They built them tough, 102 years ago!!

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Great video, but it wins First Place for Worst Video “Music” Ever.

Pathetic that Benson didn’t know that that is not a helicopter.

I remember first reading about gyro posters in Popular Science around 1961. They’ve always fascinated me with their ability to generate lift with a free-wheeling rotor. It took some real out of the box thinking to invent that.

[VietVetwcm]

“That is an ‘Auto-Gyro.’”

The video of the same flight of the 102 year old’s Homemade Helicopter is included in your Youtube link, so whoever compiled your video considered it a helicopter. Moreover, although the old Boeing engineer’s aircraft shares some obvious similarities with the 65 year old Benson design, I notice that his rotor is turning while his craft is still standing still at the end of the runway before takeoff. This might indicate that some power is being fed to the rotors from the engine, making it a helicopter rather than an auto-gyro. Or it may be that the engineer/pilot has faced his craft into a headwind for the takeoff run, to generate more lift.

[Openurmind]

I knew some aircraft “body and fender” guys from WWII. They could take a piece of sheet tin from the roof of the nearest building and form it with hammers to couture fit as an aircraft replacement wing or cowling part. Made metal vehicle models as a hobby.

Artistry, pure artistry.

[wildcard_redneck]

That was cool to watch.

[mosesdapoet]

Pic Links don’t download in my setup

[PROCON]

Pic Links don’t download in my setup

It's a you tube video, if that's what you mean. If not, I apologize.

[democratsaremyenemy]

It’s not a helicopter.

[Regulator]

And just to end up this thread, the man shown is Ken Wallis who did in fact fly the gyrocopter for the Bond movie, but died in 2013 when he was 97 and likely this video was done when he was 80, and has been on the internet since at least 2017.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wallis

More BS.

[Paal Gulli]

Juan de la Cierva flew the first practical autogyro in about 1920. The autogyro was feasible decades before the helicopter because its rolling takeoff is less power-intensive than the 'copters vertical take-off, and it was years yet before anyone was building an internal combustion engine with a high enough hp-to-weight ratio to make vertical take-off and/or hovering possible (IIRC, that threshold was 1/2 hp per lb of engine weight).

The 1933 WC Fields classic film International House featured a Cierva gyroplane.

Cierva flew a passenger across the English Channel in 1928 in an autogyro of his creation and it was another 11 years before anyone demonstrated a successful, self-powered, hover-ready helicopter.

They probably could have just put wheels on the early 'copters and limited their use to rolling take-offs and landings and put them into service earlier, but then they'd have had an a/c that was costlier, more complex and heavier than either fixed wing or the autogyro but with no material advantages.

Some early prototype 'copters could hover but those were tethered to the ground so they couldn't lose control and/or flip over. And were cable-powered, meaning the engine was left on the ground and the power was delivered to the a/c through a spinning, flexible, sheathed cable, like the old toy airplanes with a battery pack containing the electric motor that you held in your hand and let the toy plane fly in circles around your head. Which dodged the hp-to-weight problems but was only useful tor 'stationary' flight.

[Paal Gulli]

And OBTW, in YOLT they referred to Bond’s ‘Little Nellie’ as a “helicopter,” so it’s a mistake with a longstanding tradition. Mostly coming from people who don’t understand that helicopters have wings, too, they just aren’t ‘fixed.’ They spin to generate airspeed rather than relying entirely on forward motion.

And they call it an “autogyro” because the rotor system is in a perpetual state of auto-rotation. Forward airspeed causes the rotating wings to spin and the spinning produces airflow over the airfoils, which generates lift. Which is the same state that a helicopter is in when the engine quits and the pilot enters “autorotation.”