Bryan: For under $50,000 you can get a single seat Helicycle turbine
powered helicopter kit as well as for about half that an ultralite
helicopter that can autorotate. I had the opportunity to hover the little
Mosquito ultralite and it hovered and hover taxiied very nicely.
Yep I will be very surprised to see the AirScooter sell very much. They do
have an interesting engine project going however.
BTW I have to set my blade pitch to minus 0.5 degrees so that my Baby Belle
autorotates with the collective full down. If I try to hover with the
collective full down, it doesn't matter how much rotor rpm I get. It just
pushes me down on the ground harder. To hover I have to increase the pitch
of my blades.

--
Stuart Fields
Experimental Helo magazine
P. O. Box 1585
Inyokern, CA 93527
(760) 377-4478
(760) 408-9747 general and layout cell
(760) 608-1299 technical and advertising cell

www.vkss.com
www.experimentalhelo.com


"Bryan Martin" wrote in message
...
The faq page states that it will not auto rotate and I believe it. A
gyrocopter is always in auto rotation, the blades in the unpowered rotor
are pitched accordingly. This thing is a helicopter, the rotor is
powered and the blades are fixed pitched. If a helicopter loses power,
you have to transition to auto rotation by dumping the collective to
repitch the blades for the reversed airflow through the rotor. With a
fixed pitch rotor, this is not possible.

Their description of this thing makes it sound like it's only good for
tooling around over open fields or water in ground effect. The projected
price is "under $50,000". For that kind of money I could buy a
quadrunner, a jet-ski and a snowmobile and get almost the same
experience in any season. Or I could buy a gyrocopter kit and have
something that might actually survive a power off landing.


In article . com,
"Denny" wrote:

Why wouldn't it auto rotate?... The blades are no different than a
gyrocopter's fixed blades and they autorotate...
I can confidently predict that like Moeller's Skycar they will still be
pitching it to "investors" for years to come... PT Barnum was a
genius..

denny

J.Kahn wrote:
http://www.airscooter.com/pages/airscooter_main.htm

This guy got an MIT invention award and a gushing story on CBS news.

But the bloody thing has a single engine and does NOT auto rotate,
having fixed pitch blades, so you either have a ballistic parachute
that
somehow doesn't get tangled in the rotor or you die when the engine
quits above 10 or 20 feet or so.

Why do people come up with such insane contraptions...

--
Bryan Martin
N61BM, CH 601 XL, Ram Subaru, Stratus redrive.