[Promotum] VTOL

[Edmund A. Hintz]

After 3 scrubbed flights due to fog, I finally got my first hour of dual
in a Schweizer CB300.

http://www.heli.com/helicopters/300cb.html

What a brilliant experience. The sensation of holding a hover a few feet
off the ground is incredible. Controlling the thing is rather
interesting, very minor changes in pressure on the controls are
sufficient for controlling it. Being a hamhanded novice I was over
correcting quite a bit. I was able to hold a hover for maybe 15-20
seconds but beyond that I started to overcorrect and had to let the CFI
bring it back into line. It's certainly a balancing act, similar in many
ways to a motorcycle but an order of magnitude more difficult to control.
Still, having now tried both fixed wing and rotor, I certainly dig the
rotor. Yeah, it's not as practical or inexpensive as fixed wing, but damn
it's fun. I was grinning like an idiot when we left KCCR. Anyway, I'm
figuring on getting my private on rotor first, then transitioning to
fixed wing, and then seaplane. After all that I guess I'll go for IFR,
but I don't figure on flying in the soup. If it's too ugly I'll drive, so
IFR would be more for backup than anything else. I took a few photos of
the helicopter after the fact; I'd intended to take some aerial shots but
I was much more interested in controlling the thing...

http://www.hintz.org/photos/public/cb300/

Regards,

Ed Hintz
ed@hintz.org