So easy to spin a KB gyro...

[scandtours]

Ken Brock once wrote me a letter on how to spin a KB gyro.
This is what he wrote to me.
Note also how frighten he got when he saw the video which I’d sent him, me playing with zero and negative gs. (I was scared too the first time I saw the video with the blades conning like snake) They were making a nice sound when getting into zero gs
but anyhow........:der::der:
Ok, that was many years ago…

[animal]

now that is a letter worth keeping and shows how nice a man Ken Brock was.

[Doug Riley]

Giorgos -- It's great to hear the master share his knowledge.

What always puzzled me about the "never reduce G's" advice was that Mother Nature did it to you every time you flew on a thermally day. It's impossible ALWAYS to keep the G's at or above 1.0. There had to be a more realistic approach. There was -- build a machine with positive pitch stability and a bit of rotor mass).

I worked up to the "spin" maneuver on my own after reading Kas Thomas's recipe for it in the PRA magazine. If you don't get the airspeed quite to zero, the second half of the turn will be really fast. This gets your pulse up and puts your underwear at risk the first few times.

[scandtours]

Giorgos -- It's great to hear the master share his knowledge.
It's impossible ALWAYS to keep the G's at or above 1.0. There had to be a more realistic approach. There was -- build a machine with positive pitch stability and a bit of rotor mass).


You are right Doug, as always.
Why I had specified the KB gyro was just for this reason. I didn't write for all gyros.

Regarding (This gets your pulse up and puts your underwear at risk the first few times.) Here you are even more right.....

(If you don't get the airspeed quite to zero, the second half of the turn will be really fast.)....this is something which is ignored by some, not all. :):)

[Lee Scatt]

Bill Parsons taught me to fly, he included the spin in his teaching.
Later on, at a fly-in, he would see me spinning down after every flight, for a landing.
He could see that I enjoyed it.
He took me aside and told me to be very aware of my altitude whilst spinning. I kind of wondered what he meant, as it seemed obvious. He then told me of a time when he was performing at an airshow, and was doing a vertical descent spinning.
He was having such a good time, he lost situational awareness for a few seconds and screwed it into the ground.
Every time from then on when spinning, his story came into mind and I would could my spins a few revolutions short, just to be on the safer side.

[scandtours]

I have a video with a gyro pilot crashing nto the ground, not fatal, trying spins at low altitude. I will try and upload it to You tube.
You can see even from the pilot just before crashing, and from his shouting that he realized that he would never manage it.