Well, that was fun
 

Needed to do a revalidation for my microlight instructor rating and decided to combine it with an autogyro course with a view to getting the licence (France, microlights) Spent Wednesday driving to the venue in torrential rain, Thursday sitting in the club while the rain continued, Friday flying a Magni as mildly bewildered student, Saturday being revalidated, and today being sent off solo. Still need some more dual and solo to finish the syllabus, but it seems I will probably be driving home on Thursday as a very Junior sort of rotary wing pilot. It's an interesting challenge, and I can recommend it to anyone currently looking for a new experience. They go whop, whop, just like helicopters, but that's where the resemblance ends. Oh, and Avignon has some good pubs.

Watched some autogyro flying at Gran Canaria, and wandered around the hangar looking at the kit. Close up, the things resembled nothing so much as lawnmowers. And that's what they sounded like too.


(FTAOD: I don't have anything against lawnmowers.)

Hm, hm. hhhmmm. Congrats on the new experience, I hear lots of good about gyrocopters and see that confirmed. Except that they're less than the perfect option for travelling.

Still, on a secondary note, "Avignon" and "pubs" do not go together any better than "Dublin" and "anisette". If you can take my meaning. Better to have things in their proper place, lest the world go all grey.

@GtW: I truly wish my lawnmower were half as dependable as today's gyrocopters!

As I remember, in normal flight, they didn't go "whop whop" since the airflow was going up through the rotor disk. There was gentle vibration though, in phase with the rotor rotation.
Having said that, I found them tremendous fun to fly- especially at low level and in and out of small field sites.

Oh, they are fun! The whop whop is audible from outside. From the drivers seat, it sounds more like a small motorbike; )
What, you can't drink pastis in Dublin? Whatever is the world coming to?

Piper - Was it straight forward or did you have to unlearn things from fixed wing flying? Do you feel naturally comfortable in the things or do you have to remember what you are flying and where you are? The reason I ask is that I fancy giving one if these things a go but have heard accounts of experienced fixed wing pilots "reverting to type" when things go wrong - with disastrous results. The problem is one of these accounts came from an investigator in the AAIB who I very much respect. However, he had no rotary experience other than digging them out of the ground. So, what do you think?

PM

ps. Well done by the way and thanks in advance.

I saw a group of Belgian autogyros at Wick a year or so ago. They were touring, and had flown in from. Plockton to refuel. Mainly fully enclosed cockpits, and nothing like lawnmowers. But the modern autogyros are not cheap.

Piltdown man, I think the answer to learning to fly an autogyro, if you already fly fixed wing, is to find an instructor who teaches on both. I got a quick brief on the differences before my first lesson and a demonstration, so as soon as i had the controls I felt fairly comfortable. The hardest part for me so far has been the takeoff, which involves getting the rotor up to speed with the pre-rotator before the takeoff roll. haven't really had to unlearn anything, but in some manoeuvres there is a slightly different way of getting the result required.
So, yes, I felt pretty much at home fairly quickly.
But i still have a lot to learn, I haven't yet flown in difficult conditions, and I've only done a bit under five hours.
The machine I'm flying is a tandem, open cockpit Magni, by the way. Rotax engine with a turbo.
You should try it, it's a great experience.

Piper Classique
I do apologise , I misread your statement. Yes , from the outside there is a distinct "whopping", being caused largely by the advancing blade compression of the air, as in a helicopter.
As to reverting to type , this is an old chestnut of a discussion. Triggered in part by the Pee Wee Judge accident at Farnborough in the Wallis when it was inferred that he got nose high at the top of a climb and pushed hard forward causing the airflow through the rotor disk to attempt to reverse. I witnessed the accident and thought the rotor hit the fin, taking it off. The aircraft is naturally dynamically unstable and so has limitations imposed upon it which have been discussed on another thread.

No autogyro experience here, but some dual helicopter hours including reading up on how these things fly, hover, and crash. In fixed-wing aircraft, unloading the wing ("stick forward") often gets you out of trouble quickly. In two-blade helicopters with a teetering head (like the R22/44, but also the JetRanger or Huey), unloading the disc (i.e., stick forward, too, but actually any low g-situation) can lead to separation of the rotor from the helicopter and/or the blades hitting the tailboom owing to excessive flapping. Probably the same for autogyros.

Armchair Flyer, what i have been taught is that for the rotor to keep producing lift it needs to keep turning. Seems pretty sensible to me. And for it to keep turning it needs g loading. 1g will do nicely. 4g turns it faster. There is an upper and lower limit of rotor speed..... negative g is thus bad news. And of course there is a VNE. As I'm sure you know, an autogyro is always in auto rotation. They don't hover....
But they do land in small spaces. Doesn't apply to takeoff for most of them, i gather. The Magni uses more runway for that than a super cub, other things being equal. But, well, it's still fun. Solo circuits this afternoon involved a lot of holding patterns and expedited circuits in a nice brisk wind while the big boys did their thing on the ILS. That wee beast I was flying will go from 160 kph on final to 90 kph in short order and then touch down at walking pace. 90 to 160 takes a bit longer ;)
Did I remember to say that it's fun? Because it is!
Sorry about the metric units. Convert them yourself if you feel the need.
Haraka, interesting about the stability. I understand that the fix was to add tail feathers. No elevators on the Magni, but quite a large fixed horizontal surface. Certainly it will fly hands off for a while. Long enough to unfold a map sufficiently for it to disappear over the side, anyway.

IIRC the "whop whop" noise is correctly known as a "whompeter" from "one per turn".

Wallis added a tailplane ( based upon the Spitfire's tailplane outline) post the resultant reports generated by the Farnborough accident.( he also added one to "Little Nellie" IIRC) .Later on he also added very small canards to the nose at slight negative incidence to help keep it down when flying fast under max power for the speed records. He reckoned that that was "the solution" . I'm not qualified to comment on that.

Indeed, RRPM is life as some rotary pilots put it. And apart from the risk of excessive flapping, stick forward tends to reduce RRPM in helicopters, too (and vice versa), so another instance where a reaction often helpful in fixed-wing aircraft might be unfavorable in a rotary aircraft, even without brisk and exaggerated control input (such as in a low-g pushover).

Well, thanks everyone for comments and advice. Got the piece of paper after having fun in the south, off home in the morning with some interesting flying done.

Excellent! Another string to the well-strung bow.