Monday, September 24, 2007
Transport For Comfort
Is it a plane? Is it a bird? Is it Supe…..?
No, silly. It is a gyrocopter, or an autogyro, or a gyroplane, or, err, a rotaplane.
Needless to state, heavier-than-air Homo sapiens has always been fascinated and intrigued about flying. Many a youngster’s dreams have been woven into episodes of being able to fly through flimsy air.
Of course, man has done most anything that strikes his many capricious fancies and whims, typically by inventing machines to accomplish them. He will even go beyond altering man’s exterior environment to make realities of those dreams. If given the opportunities, he will even invent or devise whatever means necessary to actually change man’s physical or mental constitutions in this pursuit, bound and limited most of the time by the perimeters of ethics and morality.
But enough of and away with the ethereal musings. Over time man has generally attended to with sterling successes in satiating his many wishes and fantasies, whether as necessities or simply as conveniences.
For God’s sake, we have planes and/or flying machines of various shapes and sizes to enable him to fly, or lift him from the ground and bring him places.
But that is not the attendant question. The more relevant question is how many of the vast numbers of humanity in the planet can afford to own a flying machine for his personal uses. On land, a vast number of us can travel faster than the fastest animals using a wide array of machines – bikes, motorbikes, cars, trucks, boats, jetskis, etc. And a vast number of us can own those land/water vehicles for our personal uses.
But a flying machine that we can use at the strike of our fancy or need? A flying machine one can keep in your garage or load up in your pick-up truck like a kayak for your skyward excursions? Now, that’s a great possibility. Easily translatable to reality.
Hoverhawk Corporation here in the US can provide you with the precious key to open up your own dreams of flying on your own, in your own little plane, transporting you anywhere you want to go.
For as little as 15k dollars plus shipping and handling costs, you can own the cheapest model which can be delivered to any location you desire, packaged and requiring some assembly before use. Most cars in the market today cost at least that much and most garages (and curbs) are filled with two or three cars to a family. Making one wonder why this addictive bias toward land travel does not carry over to the equally innate love of free flight in thin air. Like a soaring bird traveling to any part of the globe, unfettered by the bounds of the very limiting constraints of geography. Where one does not need roads, or valleys, or land or water, for land/water obstacles that may present some difficulty in scaling or navigating can be conquered by simply flying over them.
So the adventure begins. First item on the menu, learn about flying and its dynamics and when done, take some basic short-time flying lessons.
So excuse me, while I attend to those. Till then.
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I prefer a conventional ultralight. For a comparable performance, it's cheaper and more reliable. It's true that you can crash-land a gyrocopter on autorotation anywhere, but you need either speed or altitude when the engine quits, and you must not be caught flat-footed to execute. A small ultralight only takes a few tens of meters to land and is not a subject to deadman's curve.
ReplyDeleteI had a specific dream use for the gyrocopter, thus my preference of it over the fixed-wing ultralight. It would be used in areas where getting sufficient take-off flat land would be hard to find.
ReplyDeleteI have thought about "stalls" that's why I am eager to learn and maybe test-fly one in due time.