Crab rude as ever. The merit (or lack of it) is in the arguement not the CV of the one who states it (I might well have no helicopter experience or knowledge), this is supposed to be anonymous and I don't wish to divulge and you should respect that and stop banging the same old boring drum. Where you have come from does not mean I don't give you a fair hearing, and address your points.
AC "Anybody else got something sensible to say about the procession of the blades around their control orbit?" ((sp))
Yea - I have: The picture of wings flying themselves to a new plane of rotation is spot-on. And it is now the concensus here, which is an arguement I have been pressing for over (a long time) years, when it was not widely recognised. It used to be (and still is in exam-land) taught as 'gyroscopic precession' in most text books, (inc CFS, crab), because it was a covenient 'packaging' of the topic. (just like it is convenient to talk about Flapping to Equality being the soloution to DoLift - whereas it isn't really).
It isn't all that bad to use Gyroscopic Precession as a description (even though it misses the beauty of the dynamics of a helicopter), since really a Gyroscope behaves the way it does for approximatly the same reason that a Rotor Disk behaves the way it does. A gyro doesn't respond at 90deg because the Cross-Product of the Angular Momentum Vector with a Force perpendicular with the Axis of Rotation throws out a result at 90 deg. It is just the appropriate mathematical treatment of the phenomenon: A point Mass on the circumference of a gyro experiences a force in one direction for half a cycle and a force in the other direction for the other half cycle. The result can be described as Gyroscopic Precession. A Rotating Wing spends half a cycle being 'flown up' and the other half cycle being 'flown down' - the result looks just like Gyroscopic Precession for the same reason (ie half cycle exposure to up and the other half down) that Gyroscopic Precession for gyros works the way it does.
(not to mention that there is, in a non-teetering head, an element of Gyroscopic Precession-like effects, where the attitude of the Head is different to the attitude of the Disk.)