Popular Science Ad

[TJMay]

This is what got me started some 60 years ago.......

[Chuck Roberg]

For me it was watching Ken Brock doing his routine at Oshkosh.

[gyroplanes]

My trigger was "You asked for it" the TV show, followed up by the Bensen kit in the Montgomery Wards catalog, then seeing my first Bensen in a hangar at Cherryland Airport in Sturgeon Bay, WI. I was hooked, but still in primary school, so the big day would have to wait 12 years.

[NoWingsAttached]

I remember these ads in PM, back in the very late 50's and all through the 60's. Wish this photo of it was BIGGER so I could actually READ IT. It looks like an avatar when I click on it. My buddy asked me in High school where I was ordering my hovercraft props and fan blades from. The following year he finished his Bensen, and flew it from an unfinished subdivision street, before the developer got any houses put up. That was probably 1968. That was definitely my hook. I loved the sound of the Mac, I loved the short take-offs and landings, I loved the tight turns just over tree tops. Man, I just knew that I HAD to get me one of those things before I checked outta here. He said his gyro was REAL hovercraft - that could hop fences and trees. THat's what I like to this day - low and close.

[TJMay]

Try this image....

Tommy

[Scary Gary]

Tommy Milton was my hook .
Going out to Georgiana's and watching Dick , John , Frank and all the other guy's fly was just so cool to me .
Thanks Tommy .

[WaspAir]

I can't help but wince when I see comments like this in the ads:
"...undoubtedly make this one of the safest aircraft in the air today".
Put category "Gyroplane", make "Bensen" and severity "fatal" into the NTSB database and you get 85 hits.

[StanFoster]

I was sitting at the Paxton airport watching a movie in the pilots lounge. I had my ppsel ticket and owned a Quicksilver MX ultalight.

Then....I watched "The Road Warrior" . I could not believe that gyro in that movie. I soon rented that movie and watched it over and over. Next I looked in a Trade-A-Plane at the airport and found a Bensen 90 Mac for sale out on the east side of Ohio. A guy by the name of Greg Ward had built this gyro. Next thing I know I am flying dads Cherokee 180 on a cross country to almost Pennsylvania and saw this gyro demonstrated about like Gary Goldsberry flies. I bought it and the rest is history. 3 weeks of self training and I was out of the nest with it.


Stan

[Scary Gary]

I still love the classic Bensen B8M.

[C. Beaty]

I can't help but wince when I see comments like this in the ads:
"...undoubtedly make this one of the safest aircraft in the air today".
Put category "Gyroplane", make "Bensen" and severity "fatal" into the NTSB database and you get 85 hits.There are more than 2,000 Bensens listed on the FAA registry under model names of B8M and Bensen. 85 fatalities equate to a rate of 4.25%.

There are 43 A&S 18As on the registry with 5 fatal accidents listed. This equates to a rate of 11.6%.

I shudder to think that anyone would fly an aircraft designed by a fertilizer salesman, even though he had some professional help with the numbers.

http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/

[lanichol]

Try this image....

Tommy

Lol. When I was about 12, I got caught by my mom sending in my $2.00 dollars for the glider. I thought it was very cool, my parents thought it was a bad idea. I only had to wait 40 years.

[RotoPlane]

Yeah...remember that well and it never left me.....good heavens....60 years.....really?….oh, that sucks big time….

[WaspAir]

There are more than 2,000 Bensens listed on the FAA registry under model names of B8M and Bensen. 85 fatalities equate to a rate of 4.25%.

There are 43 A&S 18As on the registry with 5 fatal accidents listed. This equates to a rate of 11.6%.

85 versus 5? I could just as easily spin that as 17 times more Bensen fatal accidents, but neither spin brings anyone back.

You can choose to compute deaths per airframe if you wish, but you already know how meaningless that is. Try that on the Concorde, with a quarter century of supersonic operation, countless hours and millions of passenger miles by a handful of planes marred by only one take-off accident, and see how bad the numbers look.

The point was Bensen was selling superior safety to the uninformed masses in those ads, and in at least 85 cases, didn't deliver. Shouldn't somebody, somewhere, have cause to reflect on writing the safety pitch in those ads, and perhaps feel some little slice of responsibility for enticing all those ill-fated people?

I shudder to think that anyone would fly an aircraft designed by a fertilizer salesman, even though he had some professional help with the numbers.

That's about as valid as saying Bill Boeing was a lumberman who designed airliners but had some professional help with the numbers. I know who's selling the fertilizer now.

[Scary Gary]

It's as safe as you make it .
I love the B8M .
Unfrtunatly more people at that time could afford to kill themselves in one .

[Master Roda]

That's about as valid as saying Bill Boeing was a lumberman who designed airliners but had some professional help with the numbers. I know who's selling the fertilizer now.

Thank you for making me laugh today :lol:

[C. Beaty]

Boeing was the visionary financier that organized the Boeing Airplane Company and its spin-off, United Airlines, along with a number of other enterprises. He was smart enough to leave airplane design to the professionals.

He sold all of his stock and severed his connection with the Boeing Airplane Company in 1934, following a Federal antitrust action.

The A&S 18A was primarily designed by Ray Umbaugh, ex-fertilizer salesman and ex-Bensen dealer.

It is disingenuous to equate riding on a Boeing airliner to flying an A&S 18A.
*******
Sunstate Rotor Club was organized by Dan Manning, a St. Petersburg Ford dealer, in the late 1950s to early 1960s. Ray Umbaugh was a charter member.

I never met Mr. Umbaugh but recall seeing Dan’s photo album with pictures of Umbaugh’s various Bensen derivatives.

Umbaugh introduced Bensen to the McCulloch target drone engine, making it possible for any teenager with a paper route to afford a powered Gyrocopter.

The ordinance range at Avon Park was littered with shot down target drones. Umbaugh carried several Macs to Bensen in Raleigh, NC in the trunk of his car.

[gyroplanes]

I'd prefer to discuss Newby Odell Brantly's previous designs. He was a bra designer and listed Jane Mansfield as a customer. I trust his structural designs.

[WaspAir]

It is disingenuous to equate riding on a Boeing airliner to flying an A&S 18A.


You really do miss the points, don't you?

The disingenuous tone started when you suggested sarcastically that you'd "shudder to think" that anyone would fly in the 18A because Umbaugh had sold fertilizer, and I merely replied in kind. I might just have validly said that I "shudder to think" that anyone would fly in an aircraft designed by a Doctor of Divinity (good for funerals!), built by an untrained amateur, and powered by an engine made by a chainsaw builder who designed it to last half a flight, fully expecting it to be shot down and never need to land. But sarcasm was never my point. And safety of the A&S18A isn't the point either. It's about the rosy picture painted in Bensens' advertising and whether that matches reality.

Bensen's ads encouraged every all-thumbs John Q. Public to build one of those machines in his garage and teach himself to fly it, and promised that the result would be one of the safest aircraft in the air. Fun, sure; cheapest, probably; airworthy, possibly, but safest? 85 widows might have good grounds to disagree.

[C. Beaty]

I'd prefer to discuss Newby Odell Brantly's previous designs. He was a bra designer and listed Jane Mansfield as a customer. I trust his structural designs.I don’t know much about Brantly’s Brassieres but his original test pilot for helicopters, a gentleman by the name of Walter Pierce, flew my old Bensen gyro many years ago at Okeechobee.

He flew me to his home base, incidentally near Ft. Pierce, FL in his B-2. He had an amazing collection of Brantly helicopter stuff.

[Doug Riley]

Bensen's magazine ads tended to end up near the back of the book (where space is cheaper), next to the ads that promise "make big money raising earthworms." You can judge an ad by the company it keeps.

Still, I was intrigued (at age 12 or so) and sent in my 3 bucks. I'd answered some of those earthworm ads, too, though -- so I thought I knew a scam when I saw one. To me, the Bensen brochure looked like a scam.

I wrote around (by hand-written letters, with stamps on them) to some of the outfits that Bensen CLAIMED were his customers -- including the FAA itself. Of course, they were not his customers, or at least they hadn't bought gyros from him. None of them said anything nasty, htough.

What actually turned my mind around, however, was seeing Russ Kinne's gorgeous, gold-anodized VW gyro at night in his shop. Russ was a rather famous commercial photographer who lived near me. He knew how to light a subject dramatically. It looked like the excavated-monolith lunar scene in the movie "2001."

Old Igor was quite the huckster, and his huckster instincts sometimes overwhelmed his engineering judgment. He should have put a g-d-mned big H-stab on the thing after the first couple of porpoising accidents. As a test pilot, he knew perfectly well what was going on. Instead, he refused to change, opting to try to teach beginner pilots the test pilot's trick for handling unstable aircraft -- jab-and-return inputs.

Quite a number of those 85 fatal crashes resulted from this blunder.

[Pinata]

I saw Commander Wallis profiled on History channel. A few weeks later I was flying with Commander Burgess.

[Pinata]

This one comes really close to my history as I spent many many hours at this amusement park as a kid.

[gyroplanes]

Old Igor was quite the huckster, and his huckster instincts sometimes overwhelmed his engineering judgment. He should have put a g-d-mned big H-stab on the thing after the first couple of porpoising accidents. As a test pilot, he knew perfectly well what was going on. Instead, he refused to change, opting to try to teach beginner pilots the test pilot's trick for handling unstable aircraft -- jab-and-return inputs.

Quite a number of those 85 fatal crashes resulted from this blunder.

Doug, I know and respect you very much. I do not believe Igor Bensen knew about the value of, and refused to add a horizontal stabilizer to his designs.

I got to know Igor and had conversations with him regarding a HS addition to a gyro (I must confess I did not have a clue regarding gyro stability at that age) I was responding to the infamous" Swedish FAA" stab story and wanted to hear if it was true, "from the horses mouth".

The only time I ever had doubts about Igor being a "SALESMAN" was his "take off from your own backyard". I was only familiar with typical city dweller backyards, since then, I have seen many a gyropilot operating from his backyard (none in the city yet)

Regarding the gyro accident rate back then, the numerous non-fatal accidents, to me, appeared to be from self-training and NOT sticking to Bensen's flight training syllabus. Our Chapter trained many a gyro pilot over the years prior to two place machine availability and it certainly appeared to me that the successful students were the one's that had a good book or working knowledge of the 4 forces of flight and were not afraid of machinery. I studied the accident reports and kept my own survey of success and failure.

I found that getting behind the power curve and landing in a yaw were the biggest destroyers of gyroplanes. PIO & PPO were the biggest destroyers of gyropilots and gyroplanes, followed by wire strikes.

The rest of the accident causes were quite random and in acceptable numbers.

And, yes, a functional horizontal stabilizer appears to considerably increases a student pilot's chances of survival.

Sorry we disagree on this, but Igor seemed to be highly ethical to me.