Fatal - Magni M24 Plus N590DM, Cape Girardeau Regional Airport, Missouri, USA 22 MAY 2022

I am not questioning the value of BcarT …I’m highlighting how the representative of AG who has a rather bombastic way of telling us his product is superior in every way ….. and that no other gyro can compete …when I took him to task on that comment and how many gyroplanes his rated on to make that rather interesting comment he replied no I only fly auto gyro all others are dangerous ….as you can imagine I schooled him …sorry for the thread drift

Well Greg. If anyone falls for all that stuff that guy says, then they will buy AutoGyro. It's their money. But technically, that is a whole lot of horse s**t and we all know that.
 
Hi Tyger,
My passenger in the rear seat escaped without a scratch in my crash. I whacked my right shoulder, arm and head on the ground and my cheat on the dash and was thrown to the other side when the gyro tumbled, hitting my left shoulder on the ground where we came rest. If I had the benefit of a 4-point seat belt, I would not have been thrown beyond the hull of the gyro and might have avoided breaking my arm. The 4-point seat belt my rear passenger was using kept him within the confines of the gyro hull and he collided with nothing and avoided injury. I have heard several stories of pilots in fixed wing incidents who attribute their walking away from wrecks to the use of 4-point seat belts.
OK, I'm not really taking issue with the fact that 4-pointers may often be better (depending on how they're attached), but when you say your lap belt was "next to useless", are you suggesting things would have been better for you had you not been wearing one?!
 
OK, I'm not really taking issue with the fact that 4-pointers may often be better (depending on how they're attached), but when you say your lap belt was "next to useless", are you suggesting things would have been better for you had you not been wearing one?!

Lap belt is absolutely positively not useless in a crash. It is required to hold a representative weight (189 pounds) to 12 G forward, a certain number of G's sideways and upwards etc. If you came out of the lap belt that was properly installed and worn (tightened), you exceeded 12 G at the least.
 
Just make sure you have advanced medical directives spelled out with durable power of attorney so you don’t have to live in a vegetative state after the accident from hitting your head with 12 G’s of force.
 
Just make sure you have advanced medical directives spelled out with durable power of attorney so you don’t have to live in a vegetative state after the accident from hitting your head with 12 G’s of force.

You will be dead if a 12 G sustained crash really happened. You won't have to worry about that. Its just the test for restraint.
In a real crash with a fixed object. A sudden stop from even 30 mph will get you 30 G and if that lap belt wasn't there, that 30 G would become 150 G. But those are assuming fixed objects. These are not sustained. I have crashed in someone's trike at 60 mph when they ran it into a fence. I was in the back seat as a passenger. Everything was ok. Someone has also ran an AR-1 right into the ground in a simulated engine out at 45 mph. Nose first. Broke off the nose gear. They were ok as well.
 
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OK, I'm not really taking issue with the fact that 4-pointers may often be better (depending on how they're attached), but when you say your lap belt was "next to useless", are you suggesting things would have been better for you had you not been wearing one?!
Hi Tyger,
No, I'm saying I would have been better constrained within the confines of the hull if I had been wearing a 4-point seat-belt and not impacted the runway with my head and shoulder. Lap belts do not constrain your upper body from swinging out and whacking the ground or the dash as in my incident. Lap belts are commonly used in relatively slow moving machinery such as fork trucks. If lap belts were adequate, automotive manufacturers would use them??
 
Lap belt is absolutely positively not useless in a crash. It is required to hold a representative weight (189 pounds) to 12 G forward, a certain number of G's sideways and upwards etc. If you came out of the lap belt that was properly installed and worn (tightened), you exceeded 12 G at the least.
Hi Abid, My lap belt was secured and tight and did not fail in my crash. The lap belt did it's job in stopping me being ejected from the gyro, but did not prevent me swinging out whacking my head and shoulder on the ground either side of the gyro and also on the dash. Definitely, lap belts are better than nothing in a gyro.
 
John - Got distracted with passenger or forgot to follow check list? Just speculating in advance. Very interested in how it happened so can learn from it. Dave
Hi DavePA11,
I don't want to detract from meaningful discussions and analysis of what might have been the chain of events that caused the sad loss of the Magni M24 pilot. Some comments about the pros and cons of lap and 4 point seat belts struck a chord with me re their adequacy in emergency situations. I will do a separate comprehensive post on what happen in my crash as soon as I get a chance.
 
Hi Abid, My lap belt was secured and tight and did not fail in my crash. The lap belt did it's job in stopping me being ejected from the gyro, but did not prevent me swinging out whacking my head and shoulder on the ground either side of the gyro and also on the dash. Definitely, lap belts are better than nothing in a gyro.

Did your gyro flip over. Would love to know af few details. If you don’t mind. In the Apollo gyro with similar seat belt as MTO as AR1 wen a customer hit power lines and blacked out and gyro hit ground nose first and flipped over. The shoulder harness did keep him from injuring himself but he also had a helmet on. But his shoulders were also in injure or scraped.

Does your gyro have no shoulder harness whatsoever?
 
I use to build and play with desert rail type off road race cars.
Any of the races, amateur, or pro mandated:

Roll bar.
Helmet.
5 point harness.

Pro races also had wrist restraints and fuel cells on the list.

I knew a couple guys who raced for "Station 1" out of Phx. who did an end over end 3 times starting at 80 mph. and walked away
with bruising from the should harnesses.

I won't get in an off road car without at least a 4 point.
Even a lashed on upper attachment to the mast is better than no shoulder harnesses.
 
Did your gyro flip over. Would love to know af few details. If you don’t mind. In the Apollo gyro with similar seat belt as MTO as AR1 wen a customer hit power lines and blacked out and gyro hit ground nose first and flipped over. The shoulder harness did keep him from injuring himself but he also had a helmet on. But his shoulders were also in injure or scraped.

Does your gyro have no shoulder harness whatsoever?
Hi Abid,
It's an ELA07S 914 turbo, lap belt in front seat and 4 point seat belt in the rear seat. We always wear helmets. At the point of nose wheel getting light in the takeoff phase, got hit by a strong gust coming from the port side which lifted the left rear main wheel high enough for the rotor tip to touch the ground on the right hand side. No over speeding on take off and no rotor flapping strike evidence on the rotors or horizontal tail / rudder. When the left wheel rose, the gyro veered to the right. I killed the power to idle but that is about all I had time to do. I could not react quickly enough to roll the rotor to the left to counteract the over turning action of the strong cross wind gust.

This was my sixth takeoff of the day. Happy my passenger was injury free. Not happy that I could not react to the cross wind gust quickly enough to save the day. I reckon the gust was just too strong. I now have a titanium plate in my arm and 9 screws. I will start a new thread to add more details soon. JH
 
Hi Abid,
It's an ELA07S 914 turbo, lap belt in front seat and 4 point seat belt in the rear seat. We always wear helmets. At the point of nose wheel getting light in the takeoff phase, got hit by a strong gust coming from the port side which lifted the left rear main wheel high enough for the rotor tip to touch the ground on the right hand side. No over speeding on take off and no rotor flapping strike evidence on the rotors or horizontal tail / rudder. When the left wheel rose, the gyro veered to the right. I killed the power to idle but that is about all I had time to do. I could not react quickly enough to roll the rotor to the left to counteract the over turning action of the strong cross wind gust.

This was my sixth takeoff of the day. Happy my passenger was injury free. Not happy that I could not react to the cross wind gust quickly enough to save the day. I reckon the gust was just too strong. I now have a titanium plate in my arm and 9 screws. I will start a new thread to add more details soon. JH

Rotor flap on takeoff or not, really isn't germane to this discussion but it seems like you would have been kept in place more with some shoulder harness restraint even the type MTO and AR-1 has. In fact, I know it does. Even my unfortunate customer in Oregan who literally ended up upside down in the gyro in a last year was not hurt like you. Hopefully you have gotten it in your current setup now.
 
You will be dead if a 12 G sustained crash really happened. You won't have to worry about that. Its just the test for restraint.
John Stapp survived over 45 g in the rocket sled tests down at Holloman AFB / White Sands when I was a little kid. They'd blast the volunteer up over 600 mph on rails and then stop them in about a second and a half by running them into a pool of water. Unpleasant but survivable injuries, to everybody's amazement. I am NOT volunteering!
 
John Stapp survived over 45 g in the rocket sled tests down at Holloman AFB / White Sands when I was a little kid. They'd blast the volunteer up over 600 mph on rails and then stop them in about a second and a half by running them into a pool of water. Unpleasant but survivable injuries, to everybody's amazement. I am NOT volunteering!

That guy has to be one of the most intentionally abused people on the planet.
You can't read through his history without cringing!!
 
That guy has to be one of the most intentionally abused people on the planet.
You can't read through his history without cringing!!
I think that rocket sled ride might be one of those things where trying it the second time must be far more difficult and require even more courage than the first, because now you truly understand what you're getting into, and it's worse than you could previously imagine possible.
 
John Stapp survived over 45 g in the rocket sled tests down at Holloman AFB / White Sands when I was a little kid. They'd blast the volunteer up over 600 mph on rails and then stop them in about a second and a half by running them into a pool of water. Unpleasant but survivable injuries, to everybody's amazement. I am NOT volunteering!

Where is your sense of adventure :)
 
I think that rocket sled ride might be one of those things where trying it the second time must be far more difficult and require even more courage than the first, because now you truly understand what you're getting into, and it's worse than you could previously imagine possible.
Clipped from Fandom Here:

His first assignment included a series of flights testing various oxygen systems in unpressurized aircraft at 40,000 ft (12.2 km). One of the major problems with high-altitude flight was the danger of "the bends" or decompression sickness. Stapp's work resolved that problem as well as many others, which allowed the next generation of high-altitude aircraft and the HALO insertion techniques. He was assigned to the deceleration project in March 1947..
When he began his research in 1947, the aerospace conventional wisdom was that a man would suffer fatally around 18 g. Stapp shattered this barrier in the process of his progressive work, experiencing more "peak" g-forces voluntarily than any other human. Stapp suffered repeated and various injuries including broken limbs, ribs, detached retina, and miscellaneous traumas which eventually resulted in lifelong lingering vision problems caused by permanently burst blood vessels in his eyes. In one of his final rocket-propelled rides, Stapp was subjected to 46.2 times the force of gravity.[5] The aeronautical design changes this fundamental research wrought are widespread and hard to quantify, but fundamentally important.
 
Flapping is an aerodynamic phenomenon nothing to do with how flexible a blade is at rest.

In my opinion the blade rigidity does not change much after it reaches past 75 rotor RPM. Of course it’s low rotor RPM and any wind will be capable of putting you in flapping danger. That’s why it’s good to go higher before starting to move.
The airfoil is Aerodynamically tail heavy and when the blades get beyond 27 feet they are no longer stiff enough to prevent keep them from a uncommanded positive pitch up. If the airfoil was properly designed and quarter cord balanced they would fly fine even if they were 50 feet long. That’s what happens when someone whom has no understanding of aerodynamics just copies an existing design and makes it bigger out of it a different medium. What sucks is when someone like that is approached by knowledgeable people who are respected to educate them as to what is causing the problem and due to their own overblown ego they refuse to listen to the simple solution that could correct the problem. It’s a damn shame that over blown egos in this industry get in the way of correcting problems and putting people safety at risk
 
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The Parsons-built blades on the A&S18A were 35 feet in diameter and very well behaved.

P.S. John T. Parsons, not Bill Parsons (there are unrelated others in the gyro world):
 
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The Parsons-built blades on the A&S18A were 35 feet in diameter and very well behaved.

P.S. John T. Parsons, not Bill Parsons (there are unrelated others in the gyro world):
Well the person who built the blades in question was a boat builder and didn’t understand about aero dynamic balance and lucked out on the smaller blades by them being torsionally rigid enough to over come the tail heavy airfoil. Once it was discovered the longer blades were not and he was confronted by his unhappy customers about it he was successful enough he basically told them they were wrong and go elsewhere if they didn’t like his product. The A&S 18 was a fine flying machine with a correctly balanced airfoil I flew with Don when I was 16 and he let me have the controls for about 20 minutes he was amazed how easily I picked it up and let land it with no help from him.
 
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