In article ,
(robert arndt) wrote:

Chad Irby wrote in message
om...
In article ,
(robert arndt) wrote:

http://english.pravda.ru/main/2002/06/11/30172.html

Too bad they got the history wrong. The Germans had it first during
WW2 with Baumgartl's Heliofly III:

http://www.germanvtol.com/baumgartl/baungertl.html

The Heliofly III, as actually built, wasn't a backpack helicopter, as
evidenced by the photograph at the bottom of the same page you cite.

That is the final Heliofly III-59, not the RLM-contracted Heliofly
III-57 with twin co-axial rotors powered by two As-8 motors.

....that never got built (as it says on the page you cite above), and
only existed as, yet again, a drawing by a German scientist.

The Heliofly I was a backpack autogyro, which is a similar (though very
limited) idea.

True, but his 1941 design led to official RLM contract for a military
version, the Heliofly III-57. Although I've never seen any photos
(yet) to verify it, Baumgartl experimented with powered versions of
Heliofly I before the final Heliofly III-59.

No, he didn't. He drew a version of the -I with motors on it, never got
motors that would do the job, and built a small copter of a completely
different design.

Note also that designers as far back as the 1920s had suggested backpack
or personally-worn autogyros or powered flight rigs.

And the Germans had strapped rockets onto ice skaters in the '20s too

That was a common "stunt" practice in the barnstorming days of the 1920s
in the US. Strap a few black-powder rockets on some poor schmuck, light
them, watch the guy fall over.

which became the inspiration for the 1940s Himmelsturmer one man
rocketpack which was captured and turned over to Bell for postwar
testing. Bell later claimed one of its own engineers invented the
Rocketpack (aka Rocketbelt)... which is a lie. They got their idea
from the captured German device.

Actually, the idea of one-man rocket belts goes back a few centuries
(ancient China), and was mentioned many times in the American fantastic
literature of the 1920-1940 period (the best-known example was the first
Buck Rogers novel in 1928), well before that mythical German rocket belt.

Once again, a German scientist in the 1935-1945 era who drew something
he couldn't build...

Baumgartl wasn't a scientist and he did work under RLM contract to
power the Heliofly I.

Well, if he wasn't a scientist, then it's no surprise that he never
built the actual powered Heliofly backpack version.

--
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