These are some musing and stories I have amassed that are in no particular order. If you have questions feel free to ask or just add a story of your own!

"Man gyro pilots are soooo cooool!"

My wife and her girlfriends decide they want to go camping out in the desert near Welton AZ. Being the dutiful hubby and class 3 dealer, I give her a few SBR's and a machine gun (legal, she is part owner of gunshop) to "protect" the girls and they are gonna have fun, do some shooting and get drunk around the camp fire.

So I get this awesome I dea that I should take my gyro, fly over their campsite early in the morning and drop them some goodies.
I went to Jack In The Box and ordered 12 breakfast sandwiches and had them in a sack, proceed out to airport hanger, did a usual prestart and walk around, nothing out of the ordinary and proceed to stuff the bag of sandwiches in my flight suit and take off.

I have a pretty good idea where the girls made camp, but not 100% certain, so I am going to fly over the road ways and the dry wash till I can see their encampment. All is going really well so far!

I find the ladies, and my wife hearing the gyro and knowing I am up to something gets the girls all up and out of their tents, as I do my first low pass around the outside. I climb up to about 150 feet (no, I don't need a refresher on FAA minimums, but thx) and unzip my flight suit so I can get my hands around the first ham egg and cheese biscuit.
I wave to Kat to come to the center of the campsite as I am going to drop something, I am in a left hand circle over head and bombs away!
The second it leaves my hands the wrapper comes undone and all the ingredients fly off to parts unknown! Damn! that's not what I wanted....
Since my plan is OBVIOUSLY foolproof, this had to be a fluke mixed with an unskilled laborers poor wrapping job. So, I reach in and get another biscuit out, and exactly the same thing happens again! Damn!

now I don't want to run out of breakfasts before they get any, so I start looking for a place to maybe set down. to the left about 100 yards is a nice flat Malapais (indian word meaning flat sun burned rocks) and figure I have enough room to take off again if I land there. Now mind you I had never tried this before, but by god I was gonna be a breakfast delivering hero one way or another!

so I come in and do a nice almost zero roll landing. wait for rotors to stop and there is a nice sight, a bunch of camoed out girl huntresses all expectantly waiting for some kind of breakfast! I shut down my rig, and proceed to walk to them with the bag of breakfast looking like some kind of war hero jet jockey that just blasted the enemy to pieces! The girls were swooning! "Oh Kat your husband is sooo dreamy!" I could hear them say! (well I may have imagined that part) but they were seriously grateful for the breakfast as one of the girls forgot her cooler with all the breakfast food.

I didn't want to wear out my welcome and was now thinking about Sportcopter's off road suspension and weather or not the Malapais was a good place to land or not. I climbed in, waved good bye. started up my trusty 503 and....

The engine starts up and instantly the engine roars and the rpms skyrocket! I immediately shut the engine down! and look behind me just in time to see my propellor and pre-rotator drum, slowly fall off the back of my engine to the ground!!!

I am in shock, what the fuck could have caused THAT? hell I never even heard of that! so no here I am cool guy in a flight suit and 8 grown women watching me trudge back with my propeller in hand and telling my wife, "I am gonna need to borrow the truck"

I went and got my trailer from airport and picked up my rig and all was well, except of course I no longer looked cool....at all....

on closer inspection, two of the prop bolts had cracked previously because 4 of them were shiny and two were dark...after much discussion with GSC and Jim and Evan at SPortcopter, best we can figure is the heat in the hangar during summer shrunk the wood prop between the flanges just enough that the jerking motion of the 503 was able to crack two of the bolts.

Damn lucky I didn't make it off the ground, not real sure what would have happened if I lost that during flight!
Moral? the three C's
and never try to "look" cool, either you are or you end up looking like your trying to hard!

Good story.

Okay Henry I've got one. Back when I was still in the process of building my first powered gyro (I was a poor freelance artist at the time and progress was slow). I was rake thin and my Instructor Terry had just gotten the 583 engine rebuilt again in his two seat powered machine. He had just tested the engine one up but wanted to test it under more load so wanted a passenger but a light one. I weighed probably only 70kg then so I was asked if I wanted to go for a ride to test the motor. I didn't have to think but blurted out "hell yes" or a more colourful expletive variant of same.

Anyway he had helmets with intercom these helmets had those plastic clip in attachments like you see on backpacks. I clicked them in and proceeded to tighten the straps. In doing so unknowingly I was squeezing the clips. The intercom was also not working.

All was good initially we climbed out good, the engine was smooth and producing power so Terry decided to really pour on the coals just to be certain to pushed on full power and held the nose down until we were doing 80mph+ at which point I felt naked. I wasn't sure what was wrong but something was badly wrong. I turned to look at Terry who had a strange look on his face (no intercom), and I reached up, headphones still on, where the Fuck is my helmet! I stared an wide eyed apology to Terry and he just shrugged and entered a turn the prop hadn't exploded and 500ft below in the paddock next to the airstrip was the red helmet. He descended down and I jumped out and crawled between the barbed wire and picked up the helmet. The grass was thick and lush and matted and the helmet was undamaged except a tiny black scuff mark where one blade had patted it as it flew right through the flat out prop.

Terry switched off and inspected the prop, no damage. So I was one lucky bugger that day. Needless to say I hate those clips with a passion.

We call them Fastex Fastners here, and Inlearned a valuable lesson about them in Cold Weather Survival Training...when its colder then a dead witches tits outside, they snap off the prongs!
All my 3 day assault packs and med bags had to be replaced/repaired when I got back!
You guys were damn lucky that helet didn't remove a blade in flight!

Yes sir indeed we were. I've made some pretty stupid errors flying that was one of the worst. Another guy latter had something similar happen and did hit the prop he shut the engine down which was of course vibrating like hell. Terry who'd taught him if everything goes to shit pull in back stick and slow to a vertical descent. The guy considered this counted (although he probably could have nosed over and glided down) but he descended from 500ft bounced bent the undercarriage but stayed upright and didn't even destroy his rotors. I know another guy who landed in a large Morten Bay Fig (a strangler fig tree). He had flown at treetop level down what he thought was a narrow valley only to find it swept up and he had a choice of two trees. The fig looked softer he said which was lucky as the one next to it was an 80ft gum tree with straight sides. He said the blades stopped cutting when the branch got as thick as his forearm. He then climbed down the thick vines (strangler figs life cycle starts when birds shit seeds in the top of trees and then vines go down to the ground and feed off the tree and when they reach the ground dig in roots and thicken and kill the host tree so you get a hollow down the core with a matrix of hand holds so he was very lucky. He hiked into town brought some mountain climbing gear climbed back up with a bag of tools and piece by piece removed and hoisted the bent gyro down to the ground (those bits worth salvaging the rest he threw down). Mad man.