AHC: Make gyrocopters the primary short- to medium-range travel method for the rich by the late 20th century

CivoLee

Inspired by a short discussion in the latest Politiyank thread over in Chat...

Someone suggested the idea of the autogyro being equivalent to a flying car, and suggested widespread adoption could have replaced the car of OTL. I suggested aircraft ownership is too expensive for the average person, but what about the most well-off?

The challenge is to make this a reality by say, 1980 or so, or to figure out a tactful way of telling me this belongs in ASB and I'm a complete fool for thinking this was a topic for even slightly serious discussion.
 

andys

In the UK and much of Europe? Nah. The same goes for most cities/built up areas.
Narrow, tree-lined roads with overhead wires, street lighting columns and closely spaced junctions or property accesses tend not to make for good take off and landing areas.
Possibly useful if you own a decent sized piece of land to use as a STOLstrip but landing at the other end of your journey will also require an area of land, leaving you very probably having to complete your journey by taxi or other ground vehicle.
These are not VTOL machines.
 

Kammada

To add to what @andys said, you need a whole different idea of acceptable security and risk than ours, starting somewhere in the late 60s.
 

Reggieperrin

andys said:
Possibly useful if you own a decent sized piece of land to use as a STOLstrip but landing at the other end of your journey will also require an area of land, leaving you very probably having to complete your journey by taxi or other ground vehicle.
These are not VTOL machines.
Click to expand...
I believe even the early twenties machines could land pretty much vertically, and by the start of ww2 there were machines that could power up the rotor to take off pretty much vertically. But you are right about the issue of landing/takeoff spots, I would think that finding somewhere to land even a tiny helicopter in a built up area would be very difficult. It’s certainly not something done on the spur of the moment.

But the real issue IMO is that with helicopter-like performance came helicopter-like complexity and cost. Even vanilla general aviation isn’t exactly a mass market, and helicopters (and similar autogiros) are a step beyond that in cost.
Plus there is the whole ‘one error and you die’ thing that makes most people prefer to be flown by a professional.
 

mudhead

Sport.

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Canuck Wingnut

andys said:
In the UK and much of Europe? Nah. The same goes for most cities/built up areas.
Narrow, tree-lined roads with overhead wires, street lighting columns and closely spaced junctions or property accesses tend not to make for good take off and landing areas.
Possibly useful if you own a decent sized piece of land to use as a STOLstrip but landing at the other end of your journey will also require an area of land, leaving you very probably having to complete your journey by taxi or other ground vehicle.
These are not VTOL machines.
Click to expand...
Would the Brodie System (the post-war version modified to mount under the fuselage, crucially) have helped? Apparently after WW2 he worked on trying to get his extreme STOL catapult/arrestor system into civilian applications like the ones we're discussing, but failed mostly due to all of the ordinary factors why flying car-like systems fail: high cost, safety issues, complexity of operation, etc. Gyrocopters might actually mitigate one of his problems, in the sense that they'd provide a capability to land and take off still in relatively short distances without requiring every location anyone using these wants to reach to first have (expensive) Brodie gear installed.
 

andys

Canuck Wingnut said:
Would the Brodie System (the post-war version modified to mount under the fuselage, crucially) have helped? Apparently after WW2 he worked on trying to get his extreme STOL catapult/arrestor system into civilian applications like the ones we're discussing, but failed mostly due to all of the ordinary factors why flying car-like systems fail: high cost, safety issues, complexity of operation, etc. Gyrocopters might actually mitigate one of his problems, in the sense that they'd provide a capability to land and take off still in relatively short distances without requiring every location anyone using these wants to reach to first have (expensive) Brodie gear installed.
Click to expand...
I don't see how an under fuselage system would work. The WW2 one had the aircraft hanging below a wire rope for both landing and take off. How could a gryocopter attach itself to something on it's underside and not flip over when it came to a stop? Looking at the video of the Brodie system in use from an LST, the length of landing/take off run is still roughly what a gryocopter would need from the ground, except is a few metres above the water or land.

If you could fit the system to the top of the rotor mast, that might work. On a windy, gusty day though, the consequences of missing the trapeze could be very interesting, in the Chinese manner...
 
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