Gyrocopters, built to higher quality standards than ever before, are starting to gain traction in the US among private pilots, thanks to a recent FAA rule change that increases their usability in American airspace. “They’ve drawn the attention of Uber and other air taxi startups.” “Electric power is becoming an incredible enabler for non-helicopter configurations,” Hirschberg says. Most people who fly them buy them as kits, which they put together themselves. No one bothered to build them with aerospace-grade materials. “For years these things have languished as hobby aircraft,” says Mike Hirschberg, executive director of the Vertical Flight Society, an industry association. And so the helicopter evolved while the gyrocopter stagnated. It’s a simple, nimble design, but the American military preferred the helicopter for its ability to hover and get airborne without a runway. Because the top rotor, which provides lift, is unpowered, it only spins when the aircraft is moving, and so the gyro takes off like a plane. Where a helicopter uses its main rotor for propulsion and lift and the rear rotor for balance, the gyrocopter gets propulsion from a rear propeller. The gyro predates the helicopter, having been invented in the early 1920s and used throughout the ’30s and ’40s, even delivering mail between rooftops in US cities. They gyrocopter lost the evolutionary race to the helicopter, but with modern tech, it could be making a comeback.GETTY IMAGES Among the many configurations being developed for future electric air taxis-everything from drone-like multirotor affairs to machines with both wings and tilting propellers-the gyrocopter might prove to be the most readily adaptable to the task, given its simplicity and known safety characteristics. But surging interest in urban aviation and a few new tech tools could combine to put the retrograde design back in the air. In the interceding half-century, the gyrocopter has faded further into obscurity-its cameo in 1981’s Mad Max 2 notwithstanding. OF ALL THE outrageously overengineered machines James Bond has commanded over the decades, perhaps the strangest came in 1967’s You Only Live Twice, when 007 climbed into an aircraft that his friend Tiger Tanaka-and likely the audience-dismissed as “a toy helicopter.” The single-seat, open cockpit gyrocopter may not have looked impressive, but it was enough for Sean Connery’s character to bring down four full-grown helicopters (with a little help from a pair of machine guns, heat-seeking air-to-air missiles, flamethrowers, and aerial mines). Electric flight advocates say that with a few modern tweaks, the helicopter’s predecessor could make a return to the sky.
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