After reading This Way Up and despite my caution of impending addiction, a couple of people have been inspired to try gyro flight for themselves, which is great news! However, several other people have remarked that while they enjoyed the book and can understand the appeal, gyroplanes are clearly far too dangerous and I must need my head examining (or words to that effect!). This perfectly summarises the exact dilemma I’d struggled with when putting the story together. The last thing I wanted was to add fuel to the fire of negativity surrounding my special way of flying, but to write an honest account of this gyronaut’s journey wouldn’t be possible without referring to the dark side. To that end, I purposely kept quiet about the lost souls encountered that I didn’t mention in the book, hoping the positives would far outshine the negative.
Everything in life has a balance: light and dark, yin and yang, opposite sides of the same coin, and gyroplanes in particular embrace an extreme range of emotion. Waking the rotor blades with nothing but the wind, sensing that marvellous transition as they come to life in your hand. The sheer unadulterated joy of a gyroplane’s eager response to the lightest of touch – and the devastating shock and pain when things go wrong. Sad to say, many of us gyronauts have been there. Humans aren’t meant to leave the ground: it isn’t natural, yet millions do it every day in some form or other. Looking back at the personal fatalities suffered during my three decades of autorotating, gyroplanes are not exceptionally dangerous despite their poor reputation. Seriously, how can they be when a twit like me can do it! Admittedly I’m a little biased, but it would appear that the human element is by far the weakest link.
Chris and Bob. The gyro-glider accident that should never have happened. It wasn’t the glider’s fault that a Kemble-based idiot removed 4 critical bolts from the rotorhead and left it there unflagged. It wasn’t the glider’s fault that everyone who used it during that weekend’s public event (including Chris and Bob) failed to spot the lethal omission, until it came apart in the air.
Glauco and Gina (Italy). They drowned after their Dominator hit power lines while flying along the river Po. A terrible waste of life, but it wasn’t the gyroplane’s fault.
Keith. Newly qualified: a simple case of over-enthusiasm, flying an unfamiliar machine and trying to do too much too soon. Tragic, but it wasn’t the gyroplane’s fault.
Brod. We only met a week before his demise. He wanted to come down at very short notice and take instruction on the gyro-glider, which unfortunately I was unable to arrange. Had he been willing to wait another week, I may have been able to give him enough skill to save his neck, but he was too impatient. For the sake of seven days he deprived his young daughter of a lifetime with her father. And guess what…
Brian. A careful and conscientious pilot who had hopes of becoming an instructor, his death rests with the obstinacy of our authorities. A chance remark regarding the stability of the RAF 2000 being slightly improved by removing the doors was taken as gospel, and regulation duly imposed. Brian was flying his RAF back to Henstridge after passing its annual permit inspection – and it’s agonising that he was so close to home. Early October, altitude 2500 feet, flying at 60 mph for 90 minutes without the doors on. Hypothermia. The air ambulance arrived at the crash site within minutes, yet a paramedic in attendance said that Brian’s body was cold enough to have been dead for 2 hours. The stock RAF 2000 at the time was one of the most unstable gyroplane configurations around, but it didn’t kill Brian. British regulation did that.
Gérard (France). A skilled pilot of both fixed and rotary wings. My French isn’t great, so as far as I understand it, a mechanical fault (some think a fracture in the large vertical tail fins) caused a catastrophic inflight failure. Was there a tell-tale sign that could have been spotted during pre-flight checks – we’ll never know. Consequently, this one is fifty/fifty. Sorry, Gégé.
Pierre (France). An exceptionally cruel accident. Our new instructor, flying a perfectly safe manoeuvre that he did regularly: a spontaneous burst of joie de vivre which we’d enjoyed together on his previous flight, only the day before. Did he brief his new student (a microlight pilot on his first ever gyroplane flight), explaining the radically different, yet perfectly safe part of the flight envelope that he was about to demonstrate? Or was it so naturally ingrained, a normal routine bit of fun, that the possibility of it being misconstrued just didn’t occur to him? Again, we’ll never know – but it killed them both.
And There but for the Grace of God Award. Special mention must go to Grenfell: a guy who consistently fails to show any self-restraint or sense of responsibility with other peoples’ aircraft. He could easily have become a statistic many times over, yet somehow the Swiss cheeses have failed to align. I taught him rotor handling with the glider, then groundwork on a borrowed Cricket, knowing full well that if I didn’t help he would try to teach himself. Ethics or legalities? What else could I do, with Keith already on my conscience.
After spending an afternoon with Grenfell doing two-wheel-balancing and low hops, it was time to take Delta-J out to play for a while – foolishly trusting him not to do anything stupid. Later, coming back to the airfield, I see him flying borrowed Cricket out over the nearby village towards the coast. No insurance, no authorisation, no licence, and barely adequate skill. Irresponsible and utterly recklesss.
Some weeks later, again flying out around the village in borrowed Cricket, literally seconds after he landed back at St Merryn, the engine screamed as the propeller detached and fell to the ground. Unbelievably lucky. If that had sheared off over the village…
During training at Henstridge: having been warned by a veteran gyronaut not to fly near the high ground as it was prone to strong down draughts, student pilot Grenfell proudly informed me that he’d deliberately flown the same borrowed Cricket into the danger area ‘to see what would happen.’
Landing borrowed Cricket unannounced and uninformed at the microlight training school on Davidstow moor, he narrowly avoided hitting a sheep that ran out in front of him.
Despite my misgivings, he persisted in using a dodgy set of home-made fibreglass rotor blades. They were structurally questionable even before suffering a ground strike, yet Grenfell fitted them to a new Montgomerie Merlin belonging to another student, racking up its engine hours fast taxiing with dodgy rotors at flying rpm. Nor was he authorised to do the first flights of this newly completed gyroplane, but that didn’t stop him repeatedly flying it out over the village (thankfully with proper rotors installed), and has been treating it like his own ever since. Its poor owner doesn’t know the half of it.
And lets not forget the 2007 Yeovilton fiasco that was a whisker away from carnage. Lucky, lucky, lucky! Very few have been so fortunate yet I guarantee there will be more incidents, as he doesn’t learn. Of all the opportunities he’s had to add to the accident statistics, not one would’ve been the fault of the gyroplane.
So, are gyroplanes any more dangerous than any other kind of flying machine? Absolutely not – they’re the best fun in the world! But just like any other kind of flying machine, it’s as dangerous as you let it be. Unless you have the luck of the devil…
Spinning on the Wind 