Caption Contest #44 Winner - The Old Greased Footplates Trick...

 Twitter follower @bradkoehn has done it again... he came out on top in the Caption Contest poll to earn another bacon sandwich at Oshkosh 2011 - congrats!

 And how about that crazy pic? It's real to be sure. The flying platform is the HZ-1 Aerocycle developed by de Lackner Helicopters for the U.S. Army in the mid 50's. The counter rotating rotors offset the torque and the pilot simply leaned in the direction he wanted to go. I guess you could say the idea worked better than you'd probably imagine... however, it also had some serious problems. Originally it had been intended to be flown by untrained (non pilot) soldiers, but it turned out to be a little more difficult than that. Far worse, two accidents occurred where the rotors made contact with each other and the blades shattered. There's no good ending to that scenario.

 If you look at the distance between the two sets of blades, directly under the pilot's feet, you'll see that it has far less separation than most of the other coaxial configurations. Check out the picture of the DASH unmanned coaxial helicopter I posted recently for comparison.

 Only one HZ-1 exists today - it's at the U.S. Army Transportation Museum at Fort Eustis, Newport News, Virginia. I can see from checking out the museum website that this would make a great place to stop at someday as they have several other extremely unique flying machines. Here's a nice flickr pic of the HZ-1 on display at the museum (even the mannequin looks worried!)

 The post WWII era running thru til the late 60's was an amazing aviation time period. With almost any idea you can imagine being tried to see what really worked and what didn't. It didn't hurt that there seemed to be all the cash you could need to give every idea a try as well. I'm guessing those days are gone forever...

Comments

[tican]

Evidently the dream is not quite dead yet. Here is another similar attempt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Pbq6cqY40