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!