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!
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.
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Browse previous blog posts by month and year of entry. You'll see all the posts for that time period.
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?
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.