Are gyros really safer?

[Al_Hammer]

I believe this is the Bandit gyro that crashed with two persons on board.

 

[landman]

Picture a landing. Coming in at 50mph. Just on touch down haul full back on the stick. How far is your ground roll?? Thats about how far you can expect to glide before the big drop on take off in an engine failure. If I recall correctly, 50 feet and 50 miles per hour was the magic number. Less than 50 ft and drop was survivable, more than 50 feet and there was time to flare. Stop and drop landing gear definetley reccomended.

Probably was way behind the power curve for that machine. Comfortable 65mph cruise.

Martin

 

[Vance]

I feel that I must be misunderstanding your description Martin, if I was taking off and leave the ground at 50 miles per hour and the engine goes quiet as I am climbing what is preventing me from a normal engine out landing? I began my round out at 50 miles per hour and about 15 feel agl and flare at 3 feet agl.

I would think that any altitude at all would just give me more options.

Was Joe coming to a full stop at 50 feet? I wouldn’t think that would be necessary because the engine went quiet.

Joe was a certified flight instructor and sold gyroplanes of his own design. He seemed like a smart fellow to me.

I don’t feel that the G-Force landing gear would help, Doug, if I was inverted like Ken.

I would like to understand.

Thank you, Vance

 

[gyromike]

Martin,

Sure sounds to me like a problem that could be solved with the G-Force landing gear available on the Butterfly line of Gyros.

Gyro Doug

Or maintaining your airspeed and landing like normal.
Standard part of training, fixed-wing or gyro.

 

[landman]

Apparently with stick back and nose up when he chopped the power it literaly, pretty much, stopped in mid air and fell and he could not arrest the sink in time so had to add power at the last second to keep from smacking down. I watched him try it several times. The term he used was unrecoverable. If you need 50mph airspeed to stay up and are getting it with full power and you lose power you are going to lose a lot of airspeed fast and there is just no way to get it back. Had he not been in such a steep climb things would have been different I'm sure.


Martin

 

[C. Beaty]

If I had a gyro that I thought might kill me if the engine quit at 50 feet on takeoff, it would be a target for shotgun practice.

 

[Passin' Thru]

Or maintaining your airspeed and landing like normal.
Standard part of training, fixed-wing or gyro.

Ain't THAT the gospel!
I'm sitting here totaly gobsmacked, trying to figure out what the heck these people are talking about!

Picture a landing. Coming in at 50mph. Just on touch down haul full back on the stick.

What in the world would you do THAT for?
You touch down at 50mph and haul full back on the stick and you'll zoom up 15 - 20 feet, stop dead, nose way high, and fall on yo' aice!:sad: One of them fancy smancy gee-whiz landing gears ain't gonna help you then!:sad:
I would suggest learning a bit more about gyros and how they work! and for goodness sake, learn how to land!:wacko:

 

[Udi]

lol... This thread is getting funny.

Martin Aloha! Do a search on "dead man curve" on this forum, or you can even Google it. The landing problems you are describing happen when your engine goes quiet while you are inside the dead man curve. Wise pilots don't fly there. There is no reason to fly there. If you are a gyro pilot you owe it to yourself to understand this subject very well.

Udi

 

[gyromike]

Apparently with stick back and nose up when he chopped the power it literaly, pretty much, stopped in mid air and fell and he could not arrest the sink in time so had to add power at the last second to keep from smacking down. I watched him try it several times. The term he used was unrecoverable. If you need 50mph airspeed to stay up and are getting it with full power and you lose power you are going to lose a lot of airspeed fast and there is just no way to get it back. Had he not been in such a steep climb things would have been different I'm sure.


Martin

If the engine quits on climb-out, you don't just sit there with the stick back holding the nose up!
Push the stick forward and drop the nose, maintain best glide speed, and perform a normal engine-out landing.

 

[PW_Plack]

Taking off at 50mph if his engine quites suddenly at 50 ft or less there is no recovery. The sink rate is catastrophic...

Huh? How could 50' be a problem at 50 MPH, unless you were extremely nose-high?

 

[birdy]

I would suggest learning a bit more about gyros and how they work! and for goodness sake, learn how to land!
Ditto.
I think this bloke AND the instruter have alota learn to do, before they leave the ground again.

 

[earthbnd misfit]

The thread started of, are gyros really safe. So far all the stories, especially the last one, just shows , that the pilots aren't. I think Mistral hasn't been talked into, more out of it by now. Mistral, have you flown one yet? If you take it one step at a time, you'll find it definitely is the safest form of flying. You can cut your engine at any height. 1 ft or 10,000 and land perfectly safe. You could land it in a basketball court with enough practice.
Watching some of the late you tube videos, it seems a lot of them take of behind the power curve.

 

[Doug Riley]

The Bandit's behavior points out the problems we have suffered with uninformed amateur gyro designers. A gyroplane is safe IF designed properly. Many brands that were on the market (and a few that still are) were designed by "regular guys" who have absolutely no knowledge of engineering. Many of them can't find the area of a circle -- much less add vectors or apply a section modulus formula to figure out how strong a beam is. You cannot design safe gyroplane without learning these things first. (Igor Bensen was a Stevens Institute of Technology-trained professional engineer who did know these things.)

The Bandit has quite a high thrustline (HTL). That is, the line along which its propeller thrust acts is considerably higher than the aircraft's center of gravity. This arrangement makes the aircraft unstable in pitch and has killed scores of gyro pilots.

The usual cause of such pilots' demise is a forward flip caused by the high thrustline -- a power pushover or PPO. A PPO is only possible if the HTL design error is present.

However, a less-discussed safety concern with amateur HTL designs is that the nose moves the wrong way with power changes. The nose comes UP when power is cut, slowing the gyro down. This reaction, if you're not ready for it, will result in just the sort of mid-air flare and mush-in that Joe Souza experienced.

A low thrustline (LTL) design such as the Dominator drops its nose automatically when power is cut. The same reaction can be built into a gyro that does NOT have LTL, by the use of a downloaded horizontal stabilizer (HS) located in the propwash. While the Bandit has a large HS, it's completely outside the propwash and appears to have no download.

 

[Heron]

For any landing gear to work properly, the machine has to be right side up!
If you loose engine and have an active suspension you can flare very high and pancake it on the spot, chances are you go back to hangar in one piece.
I have seen it happen more than once.
Heron

 

[automan1223]

Facts in evidence !

Facts in evidence !

Welcome to the discussion.

Living in Eastern NC where the Wright Brothers took their first flights I can tell you it is windy sometimes. The reason I chose Gyros over FW, PPC and other forms of flight is stability in windy situations. Your rotor is spinning some 300 to 350 mph at the tips. This tends to chop thru the air unlike the static wing of a fw plane that is influenced by every gust, thermal etc...

There is not such thing as a totally safe aircraft. Pilots can and will get killed as long as they leave the bounds of earth. The human body is designed for a crash of 8 mph from a height of about your elbow. After that your going to get hurt some way or another.

You can take of knitting, painting or bowling but if you have any idea that so many of us that do fly gyros do not fly anything else you owe it to yourself to get an intro ride and get hooked like the rest of us. My hanger buddy is a fw convert and now thinks how lucky he is to be flying a gyro.

Do your homework. Proceed with caution and care, get training, spend your money well.

Jonathan

I am a FW pilot (and a motorcyclist) keenly interested in gyros, so I have a few questions.

I agree with de la Cierva and a large part of the community that IN THEORY gyros should be the safest of the 3 common types of flying machines (FW, Helis & gyros).
The usual reasons are articulated convincingly by Greg Gremminger for example here.

On the other hand, I also see quite a bit of wishful thinking around that gyros ARE safer barring gross error by the pilot.
For one the evolution of gyro design and engineering has been quite slower than other flying forms with much bigger commercial success. Hence the many accidents in the 80's and 90's.
Current designs have incorporated the lessons of that era mostly through CLT and HS.
A sense of confidence that the days of faulty designs are behind us seems to prevail.
I do not think we are there yet.

I particularly question the claims of gyro capability with regard to turbulent air.
Being able to take off and land in a strong steady wind that would keep FW on the ground is no indication of a gyro's stability under gusts of random direction and strength.
Still many claim that gyros enjoy "maximum security and comfort in wind turbulence that would keep most other aircrafts on the ground".
If you fly a gyro into a strong upward gust doesn't precession cause your rotor to unexpectedly drop sharply to the right, and vice-versa for a downward gust? How do you recover?
And what about the weathervaning reaction to a strong lateral gust at low speed e.g. prior to landing?

In small single-engine airplanes I have experienced on otherwise quiet days interesting air bumps at altitude that would remind you of giant NYC potholes. I wonder how gyro's fare in similar conditions and much worse turbulent air.

A study of the NTSB crash database for gyros since 1966 returns quite a few accidents related to atmospheric conditions.

In a particular incident in 1995 (http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief2.asp?ev_id=20051116X01845&ntsbno=DFW06LA028&akey=1) a gust of wind turned the landing gyro sideways, which then flipped inverted and impacted the runway on its main rotor system.

Can experienced gyro pilots on this forum indicate how dangerous the precession and weathervaning effects can be in turbulent air?
Is it conceivable that a strong gust could turn a gyro's heading at a 60+ degrees angle with the direction of motion?
Was there ever a demonstrated case of a gyro in altitude recovering intact from an inverted situation? Heli's and FW do! (I couldn't help)