Has anyone ever seen one of these......fly!

[david smith]

A friend of mine picked this up at a swap meet for me a while back and I have been waiting to try to fly it in til I found out if it was worth anything or not.  I found a place on the internet that still sells them for $30 so I wasn't worried about potentially destroying it.
I figured our 1/2A day would be the perfect day to try so I got it all put together and got the engine to run. The flight was a lot of work because I felt like I was trying to swing a rock on a string but it did fly. I don't have any in flight pics but I will see if I can get some.

[FLOYD CARTER]

Mike Hazel (Oregon) brings his C/L autogyro out once in a while.  They are fun to watch.  But like a Bi-Slob, not so good in the PA category!

Floyd

[david smith]

I also have a bigger one that my dad built I'm guessing late 80's or early 90's. I have flown many demo flights with it. People are always amazed that I can loop it, hang it on the prop and get the rotor to stop then throttle up and it starts back up again.

The little Apache auto gyro is a cox plastic plane and I think is really cool but not very user friendly.

Here is an old pic of the bigger auto gyro when I was a little kid. It isn't very good.  I will try to take a better one when I get a chance to.


David

[mike londke]

I have one that I found in a toy store discounted to $10.  I have flown it about 10 times. It really likes to climb even with full down. If there is any wind it will climb very high on the upwind and crash on the downwind. Not enough authority to save it. I ended up shortening the lines 5 ft from what they recommend and adding some width to the elevator with packing tape. It will at least stay in the air. There are replacement rotor blades on Ebay really cheap. A neat idea but very disappointing to fly.   Good luck,  Mike

[Dennis Leonhardi]

I'm not sure the word "fly" is quite accurate; I'd describe mine as more like "hovering in a circle".  Kinda fun, no bad tendencies here ...

Dennis
 

[Clint Ormosen]

I'm not sure the word "fly" is quite accurate; I'd describe mine as more like "hovering in a circle".  Kinda fun, no bad tendencies here ...

Dennis
 

Dennis, your picture makes it look more like taxiing than hovering.

[john e. holliday]

Jim Lee flies his Gyro in balloon burst competitions when ever there is one.    I had one years ago,  Otto the Gyro,  that flew great, but no aerobatics.  Landing on grass I would catch the rotor on the ground.

[EddyR]

I saw David's fly
Ed

[Will Davis]

I saw it fly, well it kinda flew.......What really amazed me was how good it ran, started right up, seems like every lap, it lost a part of he model, then it just became a prop driven tether car with a rotor, David is working on improvements ,
The flight was so impressive, he won the technical achievement award at our 1/2 contest .