Looking for ultralight helicopters for sale. Seem to be pretty hard to find. Not necessarily looking for a kit, but a ready to fly ultralight.
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Looking for ultralight helicopters for sale. Seem to be pretty hard to find. Not necessarily looking for a kit, but a ready to fly ultralight.
Are there even "real" (functional and safe) ultralight helicopters? I've been around the ultralight community for a number of years and can't say I have ever actually seen one that was a functional helicopter and classifiable as an ultralight. I've encountered two attempts in historical reviews related to my professional work but given that both of them wound up with a dead pilot on the first attempted flight by the builder/"pilot". That said, neither of them were registered aircraft but I'm not sure if they were technically "ultralights" by definition either.
There are those spindly little things advertised in Popular Science and other similar magazines from time to time but I wouldn't try flying one. A now deceased friend of mine (Grover Krantz, physical anthropologist and now a museum display) built one a number of years back but his wife forbade him from flying it. According to Grover when I asked him about it over lunch one day, her comment was "You try to fly that and it doesn't kill you, I will."
From a physics standpoint, the weight alone for the engine necessary to provide a safe amount of lift for an average adult plus an airframe would probably put it out of the weight limits for the ultralight category. This is just a rough guess though but I don't think a two-stroke would cut it.
The other thing to remember is that flying a helicopter is not like flying an airplane. It's not something you want to try without training (not that trying to fly a fixed wing aircraft without training is smart either). They are inherently unstable and brutally unforgiving of inattention. The kicker here is that training for helicopter flying isn't cheap: it makes fixed wing training look like a steal. Just some things to keep in mind.
There aren't many ultralight helicopters. Aside from the jokes in the old PM ads and some websites today, the only supposedly successful one I know of is the Mosquito. It makes the 254# ultralight weight limit only by using the float allowance, beyond that I don't know much about it.
I have a friend who hangs out at the Mosquito factory. He went down there a few years ago to start building his helicopter, but has hung on to help write the construction manual and play around with the technology at the factory. If you need someone to talk to about that, let me know and I can PM his info to you.
I have another neighbor who built a turbine powered helicycle and flew it the place for a while, but decided that he wanted a plane he (and his wife) could actually go someplace in, so he's started on an airplane homebuilt.
We all take a good laugh at that old "back of the Popular Mech" weight shift goofball design. It's not clear that any of those actually "flew."
As Steve points out, the powerplant is daunting. Things are a little easier if you build it to light sport requirements rather than ultralight. The mosquito I think was a Canadian design (and a tripod gear). The guys who run the Mosquito factory in Florida now are fiberglass wizards and managed to get a body and real skids on the thing and make it a bit more practical. Still the choice of powerplants is key. As with the helicycle, some of the small turbines work. They've looked at a variety of two stroke and four stroke things (last I heard they were looking at a snowmobile engine that seemed to have good promise on the power:weight ratio). Even the regular N-numbered light helicopters have powerplant issues. The MINI-500 (other than goofy management problems and the flooding of their factory) really was killed by the fact that the pushing more horsepower out of the engine that it was really spec'd to do caused a lot of failures.
]Looking for ultralight helicopters for sale. Seem to be pretty hard to find. Not necessarily looking for a kit, but a ready to fly ultralight.
Mosquito helicopters have been around for a while now. They were designed by a Canadian who flew the original design at the U/L field in Oshkosh 9 or 10 years ago. The contingent of Mosquito helicopters has steadily grown each year. They have had a Grand Champion winner at Oshkosh and they regularly turn up with turbine ships, regular ships and the original Mosquito Air (open frame) most years. Someone mentioned that Dwight and his crew in Florida do good fiberglass work for these ships and it is quite true they they are wizzards with the body work and have mounted several engine variations. The Mosquito pilots fly the heck out of their ships at Oshkosh so if you can make it to the U/L strip the rotorcraft flying is usually from 12:00 to about 02:30 and both John the original designer and Dwight and his crew are there in their booth. Google Mosquito Helicopters and you will find a ton of information.