Licenced

 Sorry

I should have said something far sooner, but I have got out of the habit of blogging.

I got my gyroplane flying licence.

My Bensen -Part 2

With Covid came the perfect opportunity to spend lots of time working on my Bensen, so I looked it out and started poring over the GAs, read the parts lists, started an inventory of fixings, started ordering 6082 T6 aluminium and researching paint stripping, etc.

I was given a Bensen! (Part 1)

About a year ago, once I had started learning to fly gyros, I contacted a guy I met at a party years ago and suggested we get his Bensen flying. He'd had it maybe twenty years. He wrote back and said that if I had the time to re-build it, I could have it for free! His circumstances had changed and he needed the space it was taking up. All it would cost me was the fee to get it shipped down from Glasgow.

I contacted the Civil Aviation Authority, who were very helpful and suggested that before I went to the expense of transferring the registration, I should talk to the Light Aircraft Association about the viability of putting the aircraft back on the register. I contacted the LAA and also an inspector. However, unfortunately it transpired that the registration had been issued prior to the intended motorisation of the aircraft, which had been built and flown as a glider. They suggested that no progress was made with making it a powered machine because the would-be builder was probably told what I was being told, that having been built as a glider, the project had not been overseen by an inspector, so that it could never be signed off. You'd never be able to say for sure that the specified materials had been used, or that the drillings and fixings were as specified in the drawings, etc. I was urged not to proceed with it.

Inevitably I was very disappointed. I contemplated selling the rotor-blades and the engine, the Montgomery cockpit pod, engineering-shop manufactured engine frame and paperwork, etc. But I ended up just putting it all away in my workshop for now.

Until.....

Shirley Jennings, first British woman gyronaut since 1934

I am chuffed to bits to have just received my copy of Spinning in the Wind, by Shirley Jennings. I contacted Shirley through her publishers just over a week ago, and since then we have established a very entertaining email correspondence.

Last year I wrote to a lady called Marion Springer, who is legendary among American single seat gyrocopter pilots as a great teacher of gyrocopter flying, who started building and flying Bensens in their heyday in the 1960s. I had only just heard of her then, when I had seen her on a YouTube video, very aged and deaf, being interviewed at a gyro convention. Shortly after I wrote, she died.

I later heard from one of her daughters that she had said, "I must write back to this young man" and had been enthusiastic about a project I am working on, and for which I wanted to interview her. I missed the boat with Marion Springer, but I am delighted to have discovered Shirley in good time, as she is my age! She never met Marion either, but they corresponded and shared the same philosophy of autogyro flying. They both learned to fly gyros by the methods developed by Igor Bensen and those who built his designs from plans; learned to fly them as gliders towed behind cars, then motorised them.

I have yet to read Shirley's book, of course, but I have read one of her articles, Short Hops, on her website, and it is similar enough in style to a flying manual Marion Springer wrote to reassure me that they had the same philosophy about flying single seaters. I am a convert on the strength of Stringer's books, but in Shirley I have a friend who can make it reality, as she has very kindly offered her help in getting me flying the Bensen way.....which is really about establishing muscle memory...sensitive to what the rotor is doing.

It needs saying, here, that you can no longer learn to fly, ab initio, on Bensen style gyros. These days you must complete a course of training, first, in what is referred to as a "New Generation" gyroplane. I won't go into the details of the controversy surrounding the tension between the two schools of thinking, whether New Generation or "Legacy". What I will say, though, is that there is a small group of us who are in love with the idea of flying "minimal" gyros, inspired largely by the Gyro Captain in Mad Max 2 and the James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, and having read everything we can lay our hands on by Bensen.

And two of us are plotting to learn in a gyro-glider which I am currently refurbishing, and we are going to be taught by Britain's first woman gyronaut, Shirley Jennings - a legend in my own lifetime!

What's happened, Pete? Are you still flying gyroplanes?

I haven't blogged for over a year and I thought I should bring things up to date, in brief.

After 12 hours I soloed the MT0 last summer. The next day a licenced pilot wrote the gyro off, and for the next six months or so we waited for the instructor to get another aircraft. Plus, he had a medical emergency which grounded him for a while and he needed to convince the CAA that he was well. I had the option not to wait, but to go to a different instructor, but I really like the guy and he has a good teaching style, so he is worth the wait.

Then we had all that rain, which pretty much grounded all of us. When the rain stopped we had to wait for airfields to dry out, so that even though I started lessons again this January, we could only do it on the short runway, the hard one. 

Several hours on, now getting familiar with a more complex, closed cockpit Calidus...and frustrated that I was having to fly dual all over again...added expense and delay...I finally soloed the Calidus and was ready to do the qualifying cross country flights and consolidating hours.

Then Covid and lock-down.

So, a year and a half after starting I still have only about 20 hrs, and will have to do some more dual post-lockdown to get current and confident yet again!

 I had meant to write about everything as it happened. Mind you, it was always going to be in a knocked-down form, as I have also been asked to write something for the LAA magazine about converting to gyro from flexwing.

There is now something else exciting in the wings, about which, more later.

What's all the fuss about?

Today I flew the Gyro to Felthorpe, which is in Norwich Control Zone. Because it is Class D airspace it is controlled from the surface to 3,500', so you have to talk to air traffic control to enter the zone, and even though you are landing and taking off at another airfield - not Norwich airport - you have to report your movements on their frequency. Andy handled the calls, while I did the flying.

I am feeling bloody marvellous because Andy said, "To be honest, that was a bloody brilliant landing". Now I don't know if he is just boosting my confidence (I am a teacher myself, so I know how it goes), but hope he meant it.

Andy has a student at Felthorpe. They did a couple of sorties. In between, I had forty minutes doing circuits. I did 4 landings, all of which were pretty good. I am feeling really fine about landing. 

Here's the thing, though. When you are learning to fly ab-initio, whatever you fly, conventionally - whether flexwing or fixed - the landings are the hard part and take hours of circuits (take-off, go round and land) to master. But with gyroplanes, the tricky bit is the take-offs.

After pre-rotating the rotor up to 220rpm you perform a smooth 4-part operation: disengage pre-rotate, stick back, release break, full throttle  ...and all the time keeping nose-wheel straight. Then as you hurtle along the strip you want 60mph before climbing out. But you un-stick before then, which means flying along close to the ground until you have the speed to rotate. To get to speed you need to keep your nose down, but that means that you risk coming back down with a bump, so it is a delicate balance. What makes this particularly exciting is that there is a line of trees at the end of the runway. You can clear their tops at 60; at 50 you may well end up in them.

I am finding that a lot of what we do is very similar to other aircraft, so you can appreciate why already-licenced pilots are given credit. I only have to do a minimum of 25hrs, instead of 40. But I think I have an advantage over people who have only done fixed wing flying before. As I started on flexwing, I am used to short approaches and steep descents, which I imagine might be pretty scary to someone used to approaching in shallow long approaches.

According to the chap who wrote the gyroplane bible,

 there is a stage in the syllabus where you wonder what all the fuss was about. 

I am at that stage.

Apparently it comes not long before, 

"Oh crikey, now I see what all the fuss is about!".

Monewden - Felthorpe 50 mins
Felthorpe circuits 40 mins
Felthorpe - Monewden 1hr 10

Total time today= 2 hrs 40

Why gyro-tyro?

I am going to learn to fly autogyros and I am going to blog about it here. A tyro is a beginner or novice. 

Tyro is a word which has its origin in the Latin for a recruit or young soldier. However, I first heard the word when studying for my Radio Telephony licence for flying microlights. Tyro was used as a prefix at the start of radio transmissions between student pilots and air traffic control, though I gather that it has since been changed to "student", as I suppose most people simply don't know what tyro means.

I will stick with tyro. I like words, and of course I like the fact that it rhymes with Gyro.