Helicopter Posts

Bell 47 Do you remember your first flight? I know I do. That image of a 12-year-old me climbing into the right seat of an old Bell 47 helicopter at Greater Rockford Airport in 1963 is indelibly etched into my brain. I even remember the pi…

With autumn’s annual bird migrations underway, on October 3, the FAA issued a 4-page Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin 21-17 addressing Rotorcraft Bird Strike Protection and Mitigation. It also introduces the voluntary Rotorcraft Safety Pro…

With a week to reflect and sort the interactions and activities of EAA AirVenture 2021, my challenge was to quantify why it was the most enjoyable show of this millennium. The easiest quantifier was the people who attended. With few exceptions over …

Tipped off by the movie being made about its story of Jesse Brown and Medal of Honor recipient Tom Hudner (see “Devotion: Bearcats, Corsairs, and Real Moviemaking Oh My!“), I found the book in our local library system. In Devotion: An Epic Story of …

Nothing ruins the enjoyment of a good aviation film more thoroughly than computer-generated images. Real moviemaking, filming real airplanes is what makes movies like “12 O’Clock High” and “Top Gun” so memorable. That’s why I’m eagerly awaiting “Top…

Nothing in the world seems to make sense anymore. On Monday (September 14), GAMA published its aircraft shipping and billings report for the second quarter, and it’s not good. Every category took a significant hit. The surprise was that piston airpl…

Aviation danger zones exist in all phases of flight, and they most often catch people on the ground, especially when another task attenuates their situational awareness. Almost walking into a stationary prop protruding from the Innovation Showcase b…

With retention of active duty aviators and recruitment of qualified newcomers to fill empty cockpits a growing challenge for America’s armed forces, might it be time to reopen the flight training door to enlisted pilots who meet the physical and phy…

Waggism, playful lightheartedness, is the last thing one would expect to see at a facility dedicated to the deadly serious business of building FAA-certificated aircraft. But then I met Sally, her name printed on an aluminum placard in red Sharpie o…

Just six months on the job as Enstrom Helicopter’s production test pilot, Cody Parkovich traces his position to the night he was bartending in Marinette, Wisconsin, just across the river from Menominee, Michigan. “That night I found out, when I was …

In the simplest terms, a helicopter’s rotor blade is a wing that generates lift by flying in a circle. But the similarity between a wing and rotor pretty much ends at the airfoil because the forces acting on each of them is vastly different. Imagine…