Great video John. Of course an Ex Air Force guy like me has a decided prejudice for anything with wings anyways - and when it involves our military forces, well, it does not get better than that.
Thanks for posting it.
Same here. But the wings have to be "fixed." An old adage goes something like....."if the wings are moving faster than the fuselage, it's then called a helicopter and is inherently unsafe."
A short story about helicopters. I got several rides while at Loring AFB on the "rescue choppers" based there. Did not do much for me.
My father was a private pilot, and member of AOPA. His last aircraft was a Cherokee 6, 300. Quite an airplane, being one of the few capable of carrying it's own weight in payload and was highly sought after and often stolen by drug dealers and consequently had correspondingly high insurance premiums. He passed in 1986, while still living in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He loved flying over and through the Ohio River Valley, and had expressed a desire that he wanted to have his ashes scattered there when he died. Unfortunately, he passed at the age of 62. I wanted very much to fulfill his wish, and so asked some of his fellow pilots at Lunken Airport to see if they could help. The consensus was that, 1) it is illegal to throw anything from an aircraft, and 2) even if you did, that would be difficult to do from a fixed wing aircraft. So, the solution was that one of his buds had access to a weather/traffic helicopter, and so, off we went.
Well, with the prop wash from the whirring blades above us, a lot of my Dad ended up coating the outside of the dark maroon fuselage of the chopper, and I as well was covered with my father's remains when we landed. While "we got 'er done", it was still a very weird feeling to have to wash myself clean of my father. I guess it was payback for all the crap I pulled on him while growing up, and dear old Dad did finally get "onto and under my skin". It felt real good to have been able to grant his wish though. Ever since then, I can't look at or even hear about helicopters without thinking of my father.
