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Take the shuttle challenge!
Imagine a line of people who have never flown a helicopter in their lives, taking turns at doing just that. Now, imagine it happening for an entire weekend. Then, imagine it happening for an entire weekend without going broke replacing all the broken helicopter parts.
That's exactly what happened at this year's Hirobo Cup. The reason was the Shuttle Challenge, Hirobo's latest product and the neatest training tool I've seen yet. The obvious part of the Challenge is the landing gear. It consists of four rods that attach to a center pod and splay outward into a flat arrangement when the helicopter is on the ground. Each of these rods functions independently; if you nose the heli into the ground, the front rod shoves the nose upward, leveling the helicopter as it hits the ground. I don't need to tell you the advantage of that feature.
But the Shuttle Challenge is a complete training system, not just training gear under a standard Shuttle. The secret is in the head design. The head itself is very stiff, and this prevents the blades from striking the boom if you bang it down hard. Hirobo also worked on the stability by using very heavy paddles and adjusting the Bell-Hiller mix so that the head is very stable in hover. As a result, the Altech folks goaded us by saying "Try to break it." I was too new to helicopters to try to bang a heli to earth, but Rick Bell took the challenge (pun intended). He hovered the heli out about 40 feet in front of us and then brought it back and down quickly, pounding the Challenge to the ground with the tail rotor low. With any other helicopter-including one with conventional training gear-we would have been heading for the parts store. But the Challenge just raised a little dust and was ready for someone else to try to break it. I even took a chance and did a bit of nosein hovering, which I had never done before.
But the truly remarkable thing about the Challenge was all those folks who got stick time on a helicopter, even though they had never flown before. Kent Wien, one of Hirobo's sponsored pilots, ran this show all day Saturday, and the Challenge was in the air constantly. What became a "problem" for him was finding enough flight batteries (and charging them) to keep this machine flying hour after hour. Talk about smiles; they don't get any broader than that of a young kid on the sticks of a helicopter. There were lots of happy faces taking the Shuttle Challenge.
Copyright Air Age Publishing Feb 1999
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