Poking around a bit, I sure find nothing on the other craft. There's this from All Hands May '49, which one of the two built unknown. I'd say the guy in the right seat is laughing, or is that screaming in terror, it's hard to tell:
We have a tip-propelled machine at our local helicopter museum, called a '53 Hiller H-32 (no "X" in front of that "H" now) the no-tail-rotor deal evident:
The same shop has a '57 tandem-rotor H-21 "flying banana", I rode in a couple times when first made operable (I'm less brave, then suffer from questionable judgement). Then they booted all the passengers and hangers-on out to practice that auto-rotate thing (landing without power). Down, forward, down, down, forward, down, pull-back...BLAMMO, struck the tail on the tarmac. Whoops. Didn't hurt it too bad, but scary stuff - you only get one chance. We were discussing a portable crate to haul a spare engine around in, the plan being that if they ever had to emergency-land on a freeway or something, a spare engine would be ready to truck to the location if needed. I don't know what they wound up doing, unfortunately all effort toward their projects have to be volunteer, and I couldn't afford to do it at the time.
What was that story? Looks like they were made to accommodate landing while moving forward, nose down?
We have a tip-propelled machine at our local helicopter museum, called a '53 Hiller H-32 (no "X" in front of that "H" now) the no-tail-rotor deal evident:
The same shop has a '57 tandem-rotor H-21 "flying banana", I rode in a couple times when first made operable (I'm less brave, then suffer from questionable judgement). Then they booted all the passengers and hangers-on out to practice that auto-rotate thing (landing without power). Down, forward, down, down, forward, down, pull-back...BLAMMO, struck the tail on the tarmac. Whoops. Didn't hurt it too bad, but scary stuff - you only get one chance. We were discussing a portable crate to haul a spare engine around in, the plan being that if they ever had to emergency-land on a freeway or something, a spare engine would be ready to truck to the location if needed. I don't know what they wound up doing, unfortunately all effort toward their projects have to be volunteer, and I couldn't afford to do it at the time.
Originally posted by Aircooled
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