I heard from a very old friend a few days ago. We hadn’t seen or talked for a very long time and we only talked a few minutes on the phone, but it brought back lots of memories from what now seems long, long, ago.
Some of the experiences with him involved helicopters. During the Vietnam War era, it was easy to form a love/hate relationship with helicopters. I never liked helicopters — never trusted an airplane whose “wings” moved — but they were often a welcome sight and could literally save your life.
I’m not going into personal experiences with helicopters for a number of reasons, but helicopters are fascinating…. one of my blogs a few years ago mentioned that I worked with someone at the FAA that had been involved with assembling the first helicopter purchased by the U.S. Army Air Corps.
The helicopter is pretty much acknowledged as one of the most versatile forms of transportation ever invented. Every day, helicopters save thousands of lives.
A typical helicopter can reach heights of 12,000 to 15,000 feet, but they can go much higher — choppers have landed on the summit of Mr. Everest (29,000 feet.) Some helicopters can reach 45,000 feet.
“Average” size helicopters usually seat around 6 passengers, but the military’s Mil Mi-26 helicopter can hold up to 90 troops and 60 stretchers. In an emergency, it’s supposed to be capable of transporting over 150 people.
The first working model of a helicopter is credited to Gustave de Ponton d’Amecourt, who built a miniature steam-powers helicopter in 1861. But the idea of the helicopter is very old — the Chinese had sketches of a helicopter as early as 400 B.C. And Leonardo Da Vinci is known to have envisioned the helicopter.
I’ve flown on a number of small planes on foreign airlines where they arranged the passengers in the cabin according to weight, so the plane would be “balanced.” If you take a helicopter ride, they very likely will ask you for your weight. Don’t lie — the weight in a helicopter needs to be distributed evenly on all sides. If the weight isn’t balanced, the helicopter will list to one side, causing a turbulent ride.
If you’re good at following instructions, you can order a helicopter online and build it at home. The Safari 400 helicopter kit takes over 500 hours to assemble and costs just under $150,000.
A couple of years ago NASA flew its’ Ingenuity helicopter (“Ginny”) on Mars. It is the first helicopter to fly on Mars and it became the first power-controlled extraterrestrial flight by an aircraft.
A helicopter’s liftoff is achieved by its blades spinning and pushing air downwards to lift the chopper off the ground. Once airborne, it is the tilting of the blades along with the speed of rotation that maneuvers the helicopter in different directions.
So these magnificent flying machines have become an integral part of our everyday world. Someone said that if you are in trouble anywhere in the world, an airplane can fly over and drop flowers, but a helicopter can land and save your life.
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