I remember the project as we shared a hangar at Lakehurst while building commercial blimps. Our flight crew trained the pilots and I knew Gary, the pilot who was killed in this accident. Many of us were skeptical about the design and were hoping that the hybrid airship would not give the LTA industry a bad reputation. We did not anticipate such a tragedy, however. When the envelope was inflated, it gave me an awesome perspective of the size of the ZPG class Navy airship.
who the fuck came up with that design. "arrrhhh lets get a blimp and strap some choppers to it". Wouldn't it be better to just have normal turbines on it attached to it PROPERLY. That thing looked like some kids project on a large scale.
It looks like they were on a budget. They used decommissioned helicopters and an old retired blimp. Looks like the budget for the truss framework wasn't sufficient either.
Thanks for the reply. Love hearing from folks in the know. RIP Gary. I fly for the Airlines, but in my first career out of school I was an engineer for Boeing in structural analysis. It's seems like they did not consider vibrational harmonics of the truss frame. It even looks like a lack of basic ultimate stength from the video. It should be easy to make that kind of "truss" attachment strong. The concept seems resonable. May be with new technology it might be time to try again? May be not?
I love the pause after the one guy says "whys that" after the guy says they have guts. Hes thinking "WHYS THAT?? ARE YOU NOT SEEING WHAT IM SEEING HERE??"
In 1980, they should have known that helicopter vibrations transmit through rigid frames. Since each helicopter has it's own unique vibration, there was no way that frame-work could deal with such vibrations. They would have been more successful with shrouded fans like on the Bell X-22 only bigger and or more of them
Frank Piasecki was a brilliant aeronautical engineer who designed many early helicopters. Eventually his company would merge with Boeing and become known as Vertol. The above LTA/ helicopter design wasn't one of Frank Piasecki's best efforts to say the least. 4 Navy Sikorsky's from the 1950's slung under a !950's Navy Blimp, helium envelope, was quite an ambitious undertaking. The tremendous lift potential of 4 helicopters under thousands of CUFT of helium made sense, this design didn't.
After Navy boot camp, I went to A School at Lakehurst in June 1986 when I was 17. Our classes were held in the hangar that housed the Hindenburg. Also while there, an experimental blimp exploded. It was designed with 4 helos that was to lift tree logs out of forests.They closed the base and had everyone muster to collect the debris.
The blimp itself was decommisioned in the early 1962, but instead of takeing it apart they stored the material in the dome until someone would rebuild useing the envelope. It was orginally a N-class ZPG-3W Navy patrol which held a giant radar inside the main envelope allowing it to detect much further then conventional equipment, in the 60's the DEW Line and orbital craft made them less useful.
I was there. It was a tragic. It is the brave that take chances to advance technology through success and failure that often costs not just dollars but lives... Remembering John Glenn
From what I recall from the designers, some of the structure was made of conduit. And, there was no main control of all 4 lift vehicles... each helicopter was independently operated and only by voice could they coordinate thrust. I worked at Navy Lakehurst at the time and would go down on my lunch break to see the progress being made. Even As a young engineer, I could sense that something was not right... the blimp envelope was at least 20 years old... found in storage, and the helos were 1950s surplus! It cost one of the test pilots his life... I remember coming into work the next day and still seeing the busted envelope still in the air and smoke still rising in the distance.
Wow crazy that you were there as it was going together. I remember watching this on a PBS documentary and my dad immediately telling me it wouldn’t work because of the vibrations from the copters. It’s really hard to believe this was singed off and was probably down to trying to do things on the cheap
Thanks for the info, cool. If they would have made the frame strong enough (vibration harmonics) so the choppers didn't shake it apart, it would have been cool to see fly. I wounder what amount of lift they thought they could carry with it? I suppose it is 100% thrust or lift from 4 choppers, since their dead weight was lifted by the "Bag". Any thing that can go asymmetrical (like the Osprey) is always a risk.
I still remember the prophetic words from “Nova: The Blimp Is Back”; *four surplus helicopters attached to a surplus Navy (blimp) envelope* It was obvious that it was on the cheap and the metal structure was questionable (the fact that it couldn’t hold on the ground during hover tests was an ominous sign).
@CrabSpirits It has been done, not a copy of this contraption but RC helium balloon toys with lift and thrust fans. Not identical but a variation on this theme. Fine for a toy. Goodyear blimp has thrust motors on it, but all lift is by ballast and helium. The problem, a blimp has a huge drag coefficient (parasitic), never will get out of it's own way. Clearly the idea here, is one whose time will never come. It's faster to do remote logging with four separate choppers than a blimp-chopper.
My dad worked with Frank for many years designing some really crazy stuff. He once told me the idea was to try things because they had never been tried and see what happens. They knew a lot of the stuff was destined to fail but learned practical things that helped with other designs that did work.
I did some research. The Mil V-12 lifted 44 tons in 1969,setting a record. The hybrid in this video never did seem to lift a payload. It was only supposed to lift 22 tons. If we had taken the initiative and built something like the delta-fuselage Mil-32, there's no telling where we could have gone from there. It fascinates me to see the machines that were built then,many surpassing even Hollywood for sheer impressiveness. Many triumphed. The men of that era did more with less,worldwide.
Took me some time to figure out what exactly happened. it's a phenomenon unique to helicopters with fully articulated rotor heads. It's called ground resonance. The rotor blades are able to swing forward and backwards in the rotor disk. This, in flight is a good thing. If you are on the ground and a blade gets out of position, it pushes against the landing gear or what ever is holding the aircraft in position and then the energy is returned to the rotor head and it amplifies and gets worse. You can see many instances of ground resonance on UA-cam. It looks very much like this. Should all four helicopters have rigid head and act more like veritable pitch props and control the movement of the blimp like a quad copter does, this probably wouldn't have happened. In fact there is one quad copter that uses one electric motor driving four variable pitch props that works quite well. But there goes another $4+ million dollars of tax payer money.
Still cant figure out, why they didnt retrofit the engines and propellers into an special frame instead of mounting antire sikorsky corpuses on it. Also, isnt a little problem, that all of the rotors rotate in the same direction ?
He said this accident occurred at "the site of one of the most horrific aviation disasters in history", not that it was one of the worst. It happened at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, site of the Hindenburg disaster.
@CrabSpirits THAT would be very, very COOL. It amazes me when I look at this thing. As an engineer, it does not look workable at a glance. We tend to develop the ability over time & with experience to make very good assumptions of a structures integrity. The structure supporting the helicopters does not appear to be supportable. Lots of amazing things, though, don't look right but work well anyway, that's what engineers are for, we make it work, at least on paper.
@flanksteak5 The idea (a bad one but an idea) was an aircraft with much larger lifting load, faster more efficient than a single helicopter, in theory. The problem is as you say, 4 separate helicopters, 4 crew and big airship. 4 helicopter operating independently as helicopters (minus the blimp) would be more efficient. The logistics and maneuverability much less it's obvious lack of structural or airworthiness, makes it impractical in hindsight. Read the comments below.
Spinning rotors on a giant metal attached to a metal frame helicopters. Metal + human = bad. The blimp was extremely large (343 ft) blimp so that is skewing your observation of how fast it seems to be moving. 1:19 Look at the pilot + helicopter falling. Probably over 50 feet in the air if not more. If you free fell from 50 ft you would be traveling 38.6 mph. I'm surprised anyone lived with all the metal and fire. We had a Chinook go down in the river on the Moose fire. It crashed in the water and didn't visually appear to be going fast but the impact killed both pilots =/
i dont get this. i just saw a documentary on Piasecki and he was a brilliant engineer who pioneered helicopter design and development. How did he sign off on this thing which had no development or design whatsoever? the documentary was no help, it was a hagiography but during the end credits it showed a pic of Frank standing next to this thing and I thought, no way, they got their slides mixed up. Couldnt be him. But i guess it was. There is a story there, but I dont know it.
I'm sure people thought the same thing about the first airplanes. They aren't exactly a waste of time. I mean if you can fly across the ocean between continents in hours instead of months I wouldn't exactly call that a waste of time or human life. Someone also had to be the first one to sail across the ocean to discover new land. This is what it's really about. Science and discovery for the betterment of humans.
This is such an absurd contraption. It's like crazy aviation stuff you could see in the 1920s and it boggles the mind that they actually made this in the 1980s. On top of that I wonder where the hell the 40 million dollars went, it looks as if it had a budget of one tenth of that, at most.
Obviously, this wasn't designed for military use. This was just an attempt to clear logs faster. But the way these helicopters were positioned and attached was obviously not something I was happy with.
Unforeseen vibration? Seems like if 40 million is put into the project they would at least know to put plenty of rubber bushings in between joints in the frame.
at first i thought only some russian cold war engineers could put together such a roflcopter. but then i noticed it has "u.s. forest service" on the side.
How the hell were their "unanticipated vibrations." Seems that someone with helicopter design experience would have anticipated vibrations and designed in some tolerance. What a clusterfuck. And how the hell did this thing cost $40 million.
@geeflyboy I don't remember where I heard this. It was probly on network news when this happened. They interviewed someone involved in the project, and he said that the helis used collective only to control the craft and it was controlled at the rear heli. This heli had all the instruments for the 4. Details are sketchy for sure on this thing, so who knows?
the whole idea was to have one Main Controlling pilot with 3 additional 'monitoring' pilots maintaining the 3 additional sikorskis there was intention-plans of having only 1 pilot, as well as initial plans to have a main control cockpit in the center (just under the bag) but they then opted for 1 of the sikorskis being the 'main' with ability to control the other three... that wasn't sorted out yet so they went with the Key Pilot in One and other operators responding to his directives via radio... but the goal was Single Pilot, or Pilot-Co-Pilot (then Lift Op) controls.
I do know, but you don't so let me update you. Japanese Kamikaze were only in WW2 and no they did not use Blimps in the second war Unless it was a balloon with a cable attached as a shield for incoming attacking planes.
I don't understand why none of the designers thought this would not fall victim to ground resonance? Four chances for it, one for each set of blades, and almost guaranteed as soon as they put a load on the rotors.
As a teenagerI remember reading an artical in the early 80s about this contraption. I was skeptical the thing would work given the torque and gyro effects of all those spinning blades and the flimsy framework. It failed worse than I predicted it would.
@gmcjetpilot Didn't the Russians have huge choppers that would do this more effectively? Man,that's alot of money and a waste of human life. So close to the Hindenburg disaster spot,too. I can't believe they did this. How sad. Thanks for posting,it's hard to find. I work with experimental Turbines and they say what we do is dangerous....
@simontimon2 Well, he was maybe harsh but your statement is truly out there. A comparison: It's like when i buy a new sweet car, and while driving it around the block, the engine catches fire and blows in my face. Because of that event i wrap my sweet new car around a nice tree. A bystander sees that and says to himself:"Yup, that happened when people try to build them cars(meaning me in the burning car)" You get it? Makes no sense. Funny stupid, i was amused to.
I remember the project as we shared a hangar at Lakehurst while building commercial blimps. Our flight crew trained the pilots and I knew Gary, the pilot who was killed in this accident. Many of us were skeptical about the design and were hoping that the hybrid airship would not give the LTA industry a bad reputation. We did not anticipate such a tragedy, however. When the envelope was inflated, it gave me an awesome perspective of the size of the ZPG class Navy airship.
who the fuck came up with that design. "arrrhhh lets get a blimp and strap some choppers to it". Wouldn't it be better to just have normal turbines on it attached to it PROPERLY. That thing looked like some kids project on a large scale.
It looks like they were on a budget. They used decommissioned helicopters and an old retired blimp. Looks like the budget for the truss framework wasn't sufficient either.
This is Wile Coyote grade engineering. ACME blimps.
😂😂😂😂😂😂
@@sea.youthere One Acme blimp. Assembly required.
Thanks for the reply. Love hearing from folks in the know. RIP Gary. I fly for the Airlines, but in my first career out of school I was an engineer for Boeing in structural analysis. It's seems like they did not consider vibrational harmonics of the truss frame. It even looks like a lack of basic ultimate stength from the video. It should be easy to make that kind of "truss" attachment strong. The concept seems resonable. May be with new technology it might be time to try again? May be not?
I love the pause after the one guy says "whys that" after the guy says they have guts. Hes thinking "WHYS THAT?? ARE YOU NOT SEEING WHAT IM SEEING HERE??"
-"these boys got guts I'll tell you that"
"why?"
-"well I'll be honest with you it looks like one hell of a configuration"
We all know what he said......
Why are you repeating comments from the vid? Dumbass.
You didn't need to be Orville Wright to figure out how that one was gonna end!
"What a piece of Junk!!!"
"She'll do point five past light speed..."....
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -Leonardo da Vinci
In 1980, they should have known that helicopter vibrations transmit through rigid frames. Since each helicopter has it's own unique vibration, there was no way that frame-work could deal with such vibrations. They would have been more successful with shrouded fans like on the Bell X-22 only bigger and or more of them
Frank Piasecki was a brilliant aeronautical engineer who designed many early helicopters. Eventually his company would merge with Boeing and become known as Vertol. The above LTA/ helicopter design wasn't one of Frank Piasecki's best efforts to say the least. 4 Navy Sikorsky's from the 1950's slung under a !950's Navy Blimp, helium envelope, was quite an ambitious undertaking. The tremendous lift potential of 4 helicopters under thousands of CUFT of helium made sense, this design didn't.
My grandpa was actually one of the pilots in the crash. His name is Mike Stock.
Thanks for the post. I pray he was not the pilot who was lost.
gmcjetpilot He was not the one. He was very lucky, but I am sorry for the family of the pilot who died. It’s so terrible.
Was there a pilot in each of the helicopters? How many pilots in total? Where was the pilot that was killed located?
That’s funny, because my grandpa was one of the pilots as well…
I can resume my life with this video
After Navy boot camp, I went to A School at Lakehurst in June 1986 when I was 17. Our classes were held in the hangar that housed the Hindenburg. Also while there, an experimental blimp exploded. It was designed with 4 helos that was to lift tree logs out of forests.They closed the base and had everyone muster to collect the debris.
Yes, that's literally what the video shows.
We want to make an RC version of this with 4 "decommissioned" Air Hog helicopters.
What made them think this was a good idea.
$
Maybe not so much mad idea, as poor execution.
Zach maybe a power trip
I thought it went fairly well
Common guys. Someone died in this freak show of an experiment. Show some respect
The blimp itself was decommisioned in the early 1962, but instead of takeing it apart they stored the material in the dome until someone would rebuild useing the envelope. It was orginally a N-class ZPG-3W Navy patrol which held a giant radar inside the main envelope allowing it to detect much further then conventional equipment, in the 60's the DEW Line and orbital craft made them less useful.
I was there. It was a tragic. It is the brave that take chances to advance technology through success and failure that often costs not just dollars but lives... Remembering John Glenn
Rob Osterhouse what I'm trying to figure out is, Was there a pilot in each one of the helicopter bodies?
Yep.
Advance technology? You idiot, this was for a logging company so they could destroy the earth more quickly. God punished them for being evil
somebody somewhere signed off on this design
Thank you for the upload. I didn't knew about this project.
This looks like something I designed with K'nex when I was 6.
From what I recall from the designers, some of the structure was made of conduit. And, there was no main control of all 4 lift vehicles... each helicopter was independently operated and only by voice could they coordinate thrust. I worked at Navy Lakehurst at the time and would go down on my lunch break to see the progress being made. Even As a young engineer, I could sense that something was not right... the blimp envelope was at least 20 years old... found in storage, and the helos were 1950s surplus! It cost one of the test pilots his life... I remember coming into work the next day and still seeing the busted envelope still in the air and smoke still rising in the distance.
Wow crazy that you were there as it was going together. I remember watching this on a PBS documentary and my dad immediately telling me it wouldn’t work because of the vibrations from the copters. It’s really hard to believe this was singed off and was probably down to trying to do things on the cheap
Thanks for the info, cool. If they would have made the frame strong enough (vibration harmonics) so the choppers didn't shake it apart, it would have been cool to see fly. I wounder what amount of lift they thought they could carry with it? I suppose it is 100% thrust or lift from 4 choppers, since their dead weight was lifted by the "Bag". Any thing that can go asymmetrical (like the Osprey) is always a risk.
That pos cost 40mill? Its funny how every single helicopter managed to fall off.
I still remember the prophetic words from “Nova: The Blimp Is Back”; *four surplus helicopters attached to a surplus Navy (blimp) envelope*
It was obvious that it was on the cheap and the metal structure was questionable (the fact that it couldn’t hold on the ground during hover tests was an ominous sign).
@CrabSpirits
It has been done, not a copy of this contraption but RC helium balloon toys with lift and thrust fans. Not identical but a variation on this theme. Fine for a toy. Goodyear blimp has thrust motors on it, but all lift is by ballast and helium. The problem, a blimp has a huge drag coefficient (parasitic), never will get out of it's own way. Clearly the idea here, is one whose time will never come. It's faster to do remote logging with four separate choppers than a blimp-chopper.
I'm sure it's all carefully engineered and stuff. But, honestly, it looks like something I would make.
My dad worked with Frank for many years designing some really crazy stuff. He once told me the idea was to try things because they had never been tried and see what happens. They knew a lot of the stuff was destined to fail but learned practical things that helped with other designs that did work.
Wow. I 'totally' didn't expect that to happen.
"Unanticipated" mass stoopidity, ( incorrected and quotations added ).
If you are going to call it stupidity, you might want to spell it properly. It makes you look stupid.
Shouldn't each blade be two counter rotating blades?
I did some research.
The Mil V-12 lifted 44 tons in 1969,setting a record.
The hybrid in this video never did seem to lift a payload.
It was only supposed to lift 22 tons.
If we had taken the initiative and built something like the delta-fuselage Mil-32,
there's no telling where we could have gone from there.
It fascinates me to see the machines that were built then,many surpassing even Hollywood for sheer impressiveness.
Many triumphed.
The men of that era did more with less,worldwide.
I saw and heard this crash while I was on the base at age 17. It was crazy!
Randall Munroe sent me here!
Same here! Just saw him give a talk about this today
To the Hindenpetercopter!
@TheAmazingAtheist They got a "blessing" from god. What a blessing.
You win again resonance frequency!
Took me some time to figure out what exactly happened. it's a phenomenon unique to helicopters with fully articulated rotor heads. It's called ground resonance. The rotor blades are able to swing forward and backwards in the rotor disk. This, in flight is a good thing. If you are on the ground and a blade gets out of position, it pushes against the landing gear or what ever is holding the aircraft in position and then the energy is returned to the rotor head and it amplifies and gets worse. You can see many instances of ground resonance on UA-cam. It looks very much like this. Should all four helicopters have rigid head and act more like veritable pitch props and control the movement of the blimp like a quad copter does, this probably wouldn't have happened. In fact there is one quad copter that uses one electric motor driving four variable pitch props that works quite well. But there goes another $4+ million dollars of tax payer money.
Still cant figure out, why they didnt retrofit the engines and propellers into an special frame instead of mounting antire sikorsky corpuses on it. Also, isnt a little problem, that all of the rotors rotate in the same direction ?
PytonPagom Cheaper quicker.
Well ... ill rather give these guys some more bucks for a prototype than those on the F35 project ...
Thanks. I figured that one out but wondered why the engineers didn't catch it before it became this... thing.
Love that they blurred out "U.S.Navy" on the right side and replaced it with the same "U.S. Forest Service" from the other.
He said this accident occurred at "the site of one of the most horrific aviation disasters in history", not that it was one of the worst. It happened at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, site of the Hindenburg disaster.
Seems that place just doesn't like lighter than air vessels for some reason...
"Some folks are skeptical of the design"
Gee, I fucking wonder why.
Now you know why we never heard of Piasecki... ;)
You mean the man who invented the twin-rotor helicopter?
@CrabSpirits THAT would be very, very COOL.
It amazes me when I look at this thing. As an engineer, it does not look workable at a glance. We tend to develop the ability over time & with experience to make very good assumptions of a structures integrity. The structure supporting the helicopters does not appear to be supportable. Lots of amazing things, though, don't look right but work well anyway, that's what engineers are for, we make it work, at least on paper.
@flanksteak5
The idea (a bad one but an idea) was an aircraft with much larger lifting load, faster more efficient than a single helicopter, in theory. The problem is as you say, 4 separate helicopters, 4 crew and big airship. 4 helicopter operating independently as helicopters (minus the blimp) would be more efficient.
The logistics and maneuverability much less it's obvious lack of structural or airworthiness, makes it impractical in hindsight. Read the comments below.
That guy called it...crazy
I remember this on TV a long time ago
@gmcjetpilot oh wow, i knew they were or advertising but i did not know they were used for weather. thx!
Brilliant !!!
How would it be possible to die in this accident? The blimp hit the ground at like 4mph
Spinning rotors on a giant metal attached to a metal frame helicopters. Metal + human = bad. The blimp was extremely large (343 ft) blimp so that is skewing your observation of how fast it seems to be moving. 1:19 Look at the pilot + helicopter falling. Probably over 50 feet in the air if not more. If you free fell from 50 ft you would be traveling 38.6 mph. I'm surprised anyone lived with all the metal and fire.
We had a Chinook go down in the river on the Moose fire. It crashed in the water and didn't visually appear to be going fast but the impact killed both pilots =/
Are people really surprised that the FOREST SERVICE can't design an air worthy craft? Last time I checked trees are rooted into the ground.....
All I can see is one life lost along with $40M. I can’t believe they thought this was a good idea lol.
i dont get this. i just saw a documentary on Piasecki and he was a brilliant engineer who pioneered helicopter design and development. How did he sign off on this thing which had no development or design whatsoever? the documentary was no help, it was a hagiography but during the end credits it showed a pic of Frank standing next to this thing and I thought, no way, they got their slides mixed up. Couldnt be him. But i guess it was. There is a story there, but I dont know it.
I'm sure people thought the same thing about the first airplanes. They aren't exactly a waste of time. I mean if you can fly across the ocean between continents in hours instead of months I wouldn't exactly call that a waste of time or human life. Someone also had to be the first one to sail across the ocean to discover new land. This is what it's really about. Science and discovery for the betterment of humans.
This was for a logging company so they could kill trees and wildlife. God punished them for being evil.
that is a cool aircraft there!
@gmcjetpilot
Actually, it was powered by 1 guy IIRC in the left rear copter. The other copters are slaved to his controls.
This is such an absurd contraption. It's like crazy aviation stuff you could see in the 1920s and it boggles the mind that they actually made this in the 1980s. On top of that I wonder where the hell the 40 million dollars went, it looks as if it had a budget of one tenth of that, at most.
hookers and cocaine
@@kdcharun fat Leonard was in charge?
That framework was built to fail.
18th century technology? Someone should read a book about aviation history.
@eblackadder3 It sure was. When you stood next to the inflated bag, you could imagine what it must have been like when it saw service as a Navy blimp.
@candr
Thanks for the interesting information. Appreciate the insight.
The cascade failure of heli pod mounts makes it seem like they were way under engineered. Maby a weight limit issue.
Obviously, this wasn't designed for military use. This was just an attempt to clear logs faster. But the way these helicopters were positioned and attached was obviously not something I was happy with.
Natural selection.
Wait... "Unanticipated Vibrations? WTF... was this designed by kids in High School... something doesn't sound right... Like it was setup to fail...
Unforeseen vibration? Seems like if 40 million is put into the project they would at least know to put plenty of rubber bushings in between joints in the frame.
at first i thought only some russian cold war engineers could put together such a roflcopter. but then i noticed it has "u.s. forest service" on the side.
NASA owns a Tupolev.....
How the hell were their "unanticipated vibrations." Seems that someone with helicopter design experience would have anticipated vibrations and designed in some tolerance. What a clusterfuck. And how the hell did this thing cost $40 million.
@JONSKATEVIDS they have it's called a Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle look it up
@jetpoweredgriffin
Thanks for the data, good info. Cheers
who would think that would work?
"An unanticipated vibration" lol
Crazy tweaker contraption
What a monstracity!
@geeflyboy
I don't remember where I heard this. It was probly on network news when this happened. They interviewed someone involved in the project, and he said that the helis used collective only to control the craft and it was controlled at the rear heli. This heli had all the instruments for the 4. Details are sketchy for sure on this thing, so who knows?
the whole idea was to have one Main Controlling pilot with 3 additional 'monitoring' pilots maintaining the 3 additional sikorskis
there was intention-plans of having only 1 pilot, as well as initial plans to have a main control cockpit in the center (just under the bag)
but they then opted for 1 of the sikorskis being the 'main' with ability to control the other three... that wasn't sorted out yet so they went with the Key Pilot in One and other operators responding to his directives via radio... but the goal was Single Pilot, or Pilot-Co-Pilot (then Lift Op) controls.
I took one look at that scrapheap + duct tape monstrosity, and thought, "Follow the money."
FUCK IT! You want a magic floating machine? Just tape some helicopters to a blimp, that should do the trick...
This ended as badly as I thought it would...
Key word "decomissioned"helicopters
I do know, but you don't so let me update you. Japanese Kamikaze were only in WW2 and no they did not use Blimps in the second war Unless it was a balloon with a cable attached as a shield for incoming attacking planes.
As Also Seen On "Shockwave"!
I don't understand why none of the designers thought this would not fall victim to ground resonance? Four chances for it, one for each set of blades, and almost guaranteed as soon as they put a load on the rotors.
This looks more stick and gum design, than the actual stick with a gum.
As a teenagerI remember reading an artical in the early 80s about this contraption. I was skeptical the thing would work given the torque and gyro effects of all those spinning blades and the flimsy framework. It failed worse than I predicted it would.
@geeflyboy
Probably had a co-pilot,too,
maybe doing double duty as a flight engineer?
This was the aircraft used to transport Chris christy to the hospital when he had corona virus. The load was too heavy and crashed.
Those pilots were stupid to even fly this thing. It was suicidal
How is this a "freak disaster?"
It was a freak, and ended in disaster
oh shit looks like there are pilots in the helicopters @1:17
even me, when I was a kid and I was inventing stuff I'd test them better before so It wouldn't fails so miserably.
@gmcjetpilot
Didn't the Russians have huge choppers that would do this more effectively?
Man,that's alot of money and a waste of human life.
So close to the Hindenburg disaster spot,too.
I can't believe they did this.
How sad.
Thanks for posting,it's hard to find.
I work with experimental Turbines and they say what we do is dangerous....
My brother and dad was there when that happened.
@simontimon2 Well, he was maybe harsh but your statement is truly out there.
A comparison:
It's like when i buy a new sweet car, and while driving it around the block, the engine catches fire and blows in my face. Because of that event i wrap my sweet new car around a nice tree.
A bystander sees that and says to himself:"Yup, that happened when people try to build them cars(meaning me in the burning car)" You get it? Makes no sense. Funny stupid, i was amused to.
Have you ever played gmod
they used toothpicks to hold it together.
who flies blimps theses days?
oh the humanity.
Aluminum doesn't do well at certain frequencies
@gmcjetpilot dude it's nothing specil it's not only in the usa it's also in Belgium and a few parts of europe....
OH, THE HUMANITY! (PART DEUX)
@peepeevagi
Ha ha I hear you, but Frank Piasecki passed away Feb 2008. Beating a man who has been dead for over 2 years is bad form....