On Thu, 20 Feb 2020 08:03:02 +1300, George wrote:

On Tue, 18 Feb 2020 22:44:12 -0500
PhantomView wrote:

That relatively large thick-chord wing gave a lot of
lift at low speeds. You did not need a huge engine.

The one I tried out was an original J-3. I looked it
up and I remember the horsepower was in the
30s. The docs say 37hp. The thing would hold
altitude even at about 35 knots - speed of horse.

The military bought lots of Cubs back in WW-2.
They were cheap, they were relatively quiet, they
were stable enough to hang cameras on and could
use almost any short patch of grass as an airfield.
I guess the fabric skin also did not have much of
a signature to what passed as German radar.

I never loved tail-draggers though ... there was too
much risk of hitting a rut during landing and the
thing immediately dumping over on its nose. With
the J-3 the thing between you and the engine was
the fuel tank ......

Still, a hell of a lot of people post-war leared to fly
in surplus Cubs. The Super-Cubs are more "super",
but large numbers of J-3s are still up there too.

Cessna ... good general-avaition planes. Solid
design and I liked the over-wing models because
you could actually see the ground below.

But alas, the death of cheap AvGas put an end to
my flying. Now you can take that 16 and turn the
numbers around and then a bit. Hey, guess I could
buy one of those Gyrocopter kits - but those things
seem to crash a lot. Might be the pilots, might be
something about the mechanicals ......

Ooooh ! How about a hydrogen-powered Gyro ?
Greta might like that ! :-)


Flew a J1 only once the fuel tank was over my knees.
Not the safest machine

Confirm ... a J-ONE ? I did not know there were any
of that model - which was basically a TaylorCraft/Piper
prototype - still in service. Cannot be many J-2s either.

As for "safe" - I suppose AT THE TIME they were as
safe as most other planes. That they were intentionally
made to be cheap and minimalistic, well, you get what
you pay for.

And the cylinder heads were hung out in the breeze.

J1 to the original J3 ... yep, out in the breeze. Later
variants went to a full cowl. Looked better, but I do
not know if it had any functional relevance. The things
fly so slow that any wind-resistance factors involved
would be rather trivial.

A couple of old blokes in the US I used to talk on a group had
gyrocopters and seemed quite happy with most of the performance

They DO look like good fun. However there also seem
to be a lot of crashes. Now with an "X" machine you do
not really need much training or anyone to even confirm
your heart is beating, so perhaps that is a contributing
factor. These things are KITS too, so if you forget to
tighten a bolt here, forget a lock-washer there, it could
come back to surprise you.

I would have to do a lot of research into whether structural
issues were a major thing, cracked supports or the rotor
popping off.