Gyros,

are not any more dangerous than any other aircraft.

 

 

You should have been here for the start of that craze with the Bensons and 72 HP

drone engines. I even watched a Benson glider bouncing end over end down the runway being towed behind a Simca 4 door. Amazing how far one of those rotor weights will go.

 

I watched as people from Popular Mechanics filmed my friend on his Benson with the airplane style stick controls. He blew a prop blade that went through the rotor disc without touching anything. He got it back on the ground with the engine hanging on by the fuel line and throttle cable.  They decided not to use the story. In another episode he was doing  steep rotation take offs on a runway parallel with a 4 lane road.

 

A rotor tip touched the ground behind him and the rotor snapped off just inboard of the weight and crossed the roadway like a rifle bullet missing everything. The Benson shot off on the ground end over end and vanished into a blackberry patch. The pilot staggered out cut to ribbons with his Rum Cured Crook still in his mouth. The Benson would have fit in the trunk of any car, including the rotor blades.

 

That was 100 years ago, and he keeps that blade tip in his lower right hand desk drawer to remind him (and me) to stay away from gyros.

 

Are they safer now. Probably. But most of them can be damaged by a inattentive movement

of the control stick. Not so an airplane (in most cases). When they get that good, I will look again. I won't get on one but I will look. Too many really smart people have been defeated by gyros, and I knew one of them. Fly the plane. Sell the gyro. Call me when you are 70.

I will still be here.

 

If there is no other need of both of those vent pipes, run both vents into a catch tank in hose twice as large as the pipe. You can never have too much crankcase vent capacity.

 

I would use a dash 10 for venting with a dry-sump and a dash 12 for a wet sump. The single stock vent pipe is for average 2,000 RPM operation, not 6,500 RPM continuous.

 

Lynn E. Hanover