Bensen was selling plans for skis

[scandtours]

Skis could be fitted on most gyros.

 

[Jerry_Forest]

Twin Engine B16!

Twin Engine B16!

Giorgos,
If you look closely at your second photo, you will see that the skis were on a Bensen B-16 gyro.
That was his twin-engine machine where the port engine is mounted a few inches or cm's forward of the stbd. one and the props overlap. See the first photo.
The second photo shows it on skis.

BTW, I found these photos on the PRA Magazine dated October, 1981 on the PRA website where Members have access to over a hundred of them! (I'm #5392).

 

[phantom]

Flat skis that size wouldn't be good in the real world, ok in light powder or hard pack snow but they could hold a lot of weight in slush or even very wet snow, large skis should always be designed so they shed snow as soon as they start to lift out of the snow.
Norm

 

[scandtours]

Giorgos,
If you look closely at your second photo, you will see that the skis were on a Bensen B-16 gyro.
That was his twin-engine machine where the port engine is mounted a few inches or cm's forward of the stbd. one and the props overlap. See the first photo.
The second photo shows it on skis.

BTW, I found these photos on the PRA Magazine dated October, 1981 on the PRA website where Members have access to over a hundred of them! (I'm #5392).

You are right,
I will copy the next page regarding this and will post it here to RWF.

 

[SMOF]

I do my best to never fly where skis would work in the first place.

 

[phantom]

After more than 40 years of flying skis and floats it's those round things that I am not comfortable with, two years ago at bensendays I saw a sheriff driving slowly in a parking lot and I pointed to his wheel and Said stop, he did and I told him to back up all the while staring at his front wheel, by now I really had his attention , he ask me what I was looking at and I told him that I wasn't sure, he got out of the car and when he couldn't se anything I told him that wheels were not something that I see much and ask him if it was normal for the wheel to turn when the car was moving and stranger still it looked like it turned the other way when the car went backward, I think he thought I was crazy but he finally got my warped sense of humor.
I have never owned a machine on straight wheels, wheel skis and amphibious floats are as close as I have come to wheels.

Norm

 

[Doug Riley]

I bought a set of "classic" wooden water skis at a yard sale for $5 and used them quite successfully on my Kolb U.L. plane. Great fun landing and taking off from frozen Lake Champlain (120 miles long). There was no steering worth mentioning and no brakes. In fact, on any slope the thing turned into a sled.

I was leery of putting the skis on a gyro, however, because of the possibility of drag-over should a cable or bungee slip or break and allow a ski to meet the wind at a non-horizontal angle. I'd want to explore the adequacy of the H-stab in this new role before gyro-skiing.

 

[Jerry_Forest]

Be sure your skis are mounted so they cannot "flap" out of control. In the '70's there was a fatal accident in Quebec when the front ski on a Bensen went dynamically unstable at altitude. I never found out the exact sequence of events, but the machine went out of control and crashed.

Does anyone have the Bensen plans for mounting skis? It would be interesting to see if there were any travel limiters or dampers in his design.

 

[DavePA11]

Wonder if Sport Copter will offer skis for Vortex M912?

 

[phantom]

If you are going to put skis on your machine don't use bungees , they can cause a lot of problems if they break, the attachment breaks or an axel breaks, I was testing a new set of skis by running it around on the snow without the rotor and hit a patch of hidden slush which grabbed the ski, the machine pivoted around the stuck ski and broke the axel, the machine continued to slide stretching the bungee until the now unloaded ski broke loose and the stretched bungees pulled the ski into the spinning prop, the bungees wound up and the ski was spinning , the out of balance broke the engine loose, when the engine fell it pulled the throttle wide open and the prop and engine chewed up everything on the gyro that it could get at, I learned that if a ski or anything else breaks off it needs to stay gone instead of returning like something out of a slingshot.
Norm.

 

[scandtours]

It is a great experience flying on skis and it needs some practice controlling it on the ground.
Here it is in Malmö, Sweden, with the great Instructor for gyroplanes and not only, Roman Tadic, (to the right.)
Unfortunately we don't have snow here in Cyprus, only for few days maybe for some winters atTroodos Mountains.