Sounds fantastic Chuck. I knew a helicopter Ag pilot, actually US Coast Guard when I met him. Great guy, lots of stories with brilliant sense of humour and turn of phrase - "went down like a waxed piano". Very outgoing for rotary!
SN3
Still no examples of light aircraft commonly flown privately with a glide ratio less than 7:1?
When you find a helicopter with a rotor diameter the same as the propeller on the arrow, then you'll have your comparison
The entire point is that a helicopter’s rotor, while being aerodynamically a propeller, has to be very large in order to produce a lot of thrust. If a helicopter of a reasonable weight and power existed with a rotor the size of an Arrow’s prop then it would in fact support
your view, not mine. If you will only accept the relevance of non-existent aircraft that would prove your mistaken physics then we are really not going to get very far. The whole relevance to my point is in the difference in size between the Arrow prop and the R44 rotor.
I think your confusion is in assuming that thrust has to be forward. Of course the lift of a helicopter is just thrust produced in an upward direction. That is the thrust I am talking about. An autogyro is an irrelevance only introduced by you. It has nothing to do with any of the points I have made, as the big propeller on the top is not powered directly by the engine, so cannot illustrate the greater thrust produced by an engine coupled to a larger prop.
The meaning of power cannot be irrelevant if we are talking about power. So far you have clearly shown that you have misunderstood the meaning at every mention.
The difference between a helicopter and an aeroplane is clear to me. That is why I only used the helicopter to illustrate that power can be used to produce lift and that a large propeller produces more thrust than a small propeller, given the same power.
You on the other hand have just done exactly what you said incorrectly I had done, and mistaken a helicopter for an aeroplane. Since a helicopter flies in a completely different way to an aeroplane none of my arguments apply to a helicopter. Yet you use a helicopter as a counter example. Therefore either you have been unable to follow any of the discussion and are really lost, or you really think aeroplanes and helicopters fly in a similar way. So if you thought I was thick when you mistakenly believed I had made that error, what do you think of yourself now that you
have?
No-one “allows” me to fly aircraft, thanks. I authorise myself, and others, to fly aircraft. That is my job, along with ensuring that when we fly we all fly safely.
I never denied that an aircraft with poor glide ratio could fly with limited power by the way. What I pointed out was that a typical GA design would not fly if it had a glide ratio that poor, because of the relationship between glide ratio and lift to drag ratio. I really do mean it, if you just tripled the drag on these aircraft they genuinely wouldn’t fly. I am bemused by the fact that you think they would.
Perhaps you are right that someone here should be kept away from all aircraft!
Actually I don’t think that is the case. I don’t think you are stupid at all. I think you are just hide-bound and stuck in simplified concepts you were taught years ago in principles of flight groundschool, perfectly good enough for flying but not useful beyond that. Concepts like thrust only being along the line of travel. Either your physics wasn’t up to any really deep understanding of those concepts and their inter-relationships or more likely you simply were not that interested.