Comments on: Gyro pilot saves drowning friend https://texas-flyer.com/lightflight-pdfs/LightFlight/2007/09/gyro-pilot-saves-drowning-friend/ A reader blog about flying ultralights with Robert Laird Tue, 03 May 2011 14:39:32 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.2 By: Robert https://texas-flyer.com/lightflight-pdfs/LightFlight/2007/09/gyro-pilot-saves-drowning-friend/#comment-189 Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:29:01 +0000 https://texas-flyer.com/lightflight-pdfs/LightFlight/2007/09/gyro-pilot-saves-drowning-friend/#comment-189 Ah, the old “floats on a gyro” question! Well, it can be done, and has been done, but…. With a gyro, w&b and center-of-gravity is everything, so, done haphazardly, putting floats on a gyro is not just a poor decision, it could be downright deadly. But if you carefully adjusted all factors for floats — best done if building from scratch — then it’s possible to do it and do it safely. I actually have an interest in this topic, as I would love to have a gyro on floats. But I’m quite a ways away from even getting a conventional gyro.

]]> By: dieter https://texas-flyer.com/lightflight-pdfs/LightFlight/2007/09/gyro-pilot-saves-drowning-friend/#comment-188 Tue, 18 Sep 2007 13:07:57 +0000 https://texas-flyer.com/lightflight-pdfs/LightFlight/2007/09/gyro-pilot-saves-drowning-friend/#comment-188 This story is amazing – the Aventura driver apparently was thrown out of his amphibian when he “cartwheeled” it onto the lake, the plane then took off by itself and crashed about a mile from where the pilot had been thrown out. I take my hat off to the gyro pilot for facilitating the rescue in such a cool manner.

As an Aventura driver, there’s a lot of food for thought in that story, particularly about keeping the doors on and wearing of PFD.

As for the argument that a helicopter would have made a better rescue vehicle: unless it was a full-fledged rescue chopper, it could have done nothing SAFELY but play a bird dog role, just like the gyro. There’s a Youtube out there of a helicopter crashing as it tries to tow a stricken motorboat – not a pretty sight!

BTW, do you know if you can put floats on a gyro?

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