by Rosalind S. Helderman, The Washington Post
From a gyroplane flying low and slow, downtown Leesburg appears to be a small clump of buildings in a vast expanse of green trees and hills. A tiny arm of the Potomac River curves off in one distance, and the Blue Ridge Mountains poke through the haze in another. Housing developments growing out of a hillside are easily visible, along with bulldozers clearing the ground nearby, making way for more.
Smaller details of daily life also are easy to spot from about 650 feet in the air, especially coasting at an easy 90 mph on a clear morning with an estimated 15 to 20 miles of visibility. A Pepsi truck zooms down King Street for a delivery, a red passenger car rolls along a subdivision’s streets.
That’s the point of this low-speed buzz over Leesburg, to show how easily law enforcement personnel could spot traffic tangles or terrorists on foot from the gyroplane’s generous windows. Add a few high-tech gadgets, and pilots could see trouble almost as well at night.
“We can really circle in and see anything nasty going on,” James P. Mayfield III, chief of flight operations for the gyroplane’s manufacturer, Groen Brothers Aviation Inc., said as he lightly tapped the hand controls.
GBA brought the gyroplane to Leesburg Executive Airport last weekend to show such potential buyers as the FBI and the District’s Metropolitan Police Department. Groen hopes the post-Sept. 11 push for more eyes in the sky patrolling roadways, shorelines and airports will attract buyers for the gyroplane, which it calls the Homeland Defender.
While in town, the 24-foot flier, with its helicopter-like rotor on top and airplane-like propeller in the rear, turned other heads as well.
“That was a first,” said Loudoun County Sheriff Stephen O. Simpson, who spotted the gyroplane circling above the County Government Center on Monday.
“We’ve seen biplanes and lots of single-engine craft. We’ve never really seen anything like that. . . . When I saw it, I said, ‘That’s something that can’t decide whether it wants to be a helicopter or an airplane.’ ”
In fact, the gyroplane is something of a hybrid between the two. Looking for an aircraft that would not stall in flight, Spanish inventor Juan de la Cierva devised the gyroplane concept in 1923. The craft was popular in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was used to deliver mail at some post offices, including in Camden, N.J., and Washington.
But the Depression ended development in the expensive aviation industry, and by the time World War II revived interest, work on the gyroplane had all but vanished in favor of helicopter development.
Like a helicopter, the GBA gyroplane can take off and land almost vertically, meaning that it doesn’t need a runway. In a pinch, it can land on a surface not much larger than its 42-foot rotor diameter. Unlike a helicopter engine, the gyroplane’s 420-horsepower Rolls Royce engine powers its overhead rotor blade only before flight as the craft sits on the ground.
When the rotor reaches flying speed, engine power to the blade is cut. With a little roll and a quick jump, the gyroplane is airborne. For the rest of the flight, the engine powers only the rear propeller that pushes the gyroplane forward. The rotor continues to turn on its own due to airflow moving upward through the blade. For this reason, gyroplanes are also called “autogyros.”
The GBA gyroplane took 16 years and about $46 million to develop, and this was its first East Coast exhibition. Salespeople showed it off at the Small Business Homeland Defense Expo in Washington last week before bringing it to Leesburg for weekend demonstration flights.
Though several companies have made sport gyroplanes for years as home kits that allow individuals to build the plane and fly it from their yards, GBA sales manager Al Waddill said his company was the first since at least the 1960s to try to market the plane for commercial use.
The company advertises that the gyroplane is safer than fixed-wing airplanes and helicopters and much less expensive to operate, partly because it doesn’t need a transmission or tail rudder, helicopter parts that require maintenance and periodic replacement.
Before Sept. 11, the company planned to market its gyroplane to law enforcement and as a commercial craft, useful for crop dusting, land surveys or as a commuter plane. Now, GBA is focusing primarily on law enforcement, Waddill said.
He said the craft flew 67 missions without undergoing maintenance as it patrolled Salt Lake City International Airport for the Utah Olympic Public Safety Command during the 2002 Winter Olympics. GBA is based in Salt Lake City.
“We’re trying to put this on people’s radar screens,” said Tyler Coplen, a research chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey who is helping to sell the craft in this area. GBA’s gyroplane costs about $750,000. “There’s a whole lot of money out there for homeland defense. Since Sept. 11, it’s a whole different ball game.”
Waddill said the gyroplane was shown to aides for numerous senators and members of the House, as well as officials with the City of Richmond and the Virginia State Police.
Operations Sgt. Steven Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Air Support Unit came to Leesburg on Monday to fly the gyroplane and prepare a report for his superiors. D.C. police operate one helicopter, but Smith said they are constantly looking at new technology.
“I want to be able to say, ‘I’ve flown this. This is what it does, and this is what it doesn’t do,’ ” said Smith, an Ashburn resident.
Smith said he was impressed with the gyroplane’s quick turning ability and planned to give it high marks. He said that finding mechanics could be difficult, however, and that although the gyroplane seats four, it can lift less weight than a helicopter.
That means it couldn’t be used to give aerial tours of the District, a frequent public relations job for the department’s current helicopter.