Here’s something we bet you didn’t think was possible – an elephant that could fly and dance in the sky. In the 1970s, the Indian Air Force discovered a creative way to showcase its Chetak helicopter. See for yourself.
I used to fly on the company helicopter pretty regularly. It would go around to the different sites in the broader area, picking up and dropping off. One time, we stopped at a site and a very, very large man got in and sat in back on one side. He was about as heavy as you can imagine a person being and still walking around on his own power. The pilot went straight up from the pad a couple hundred feet, played with settings on the stick, dropped maybe twenty feet, played some more, up and down a couple more times, then flew away like normal. I’d never seen them do that before or after. I assume he must have been getting the settings right for the unusually unbalanced load.
My coworker who was on that flight was really anxious about it. I was pretty confident that it was just a matter of balancing the load.
In those days I was getting to take the helicopter for a meeting with every other week, and it was always the highlight of the week. Those things are just so damned fun. They can clearly haul a lot more weight than a cab full of people.
I used to fly on the company helicopter pretty regularly. It would go around to the different sites in the broader area, picking up and dropping off. One time, we stopped at a site and a very, very large man got in and sat in back on one side. He was about as heavy as you can imagine a person being and still walking around on his own power. The pilot went straight up from the pad a couple hundred feet, played with settings on the stick, dropped maybe twenty feet, played some more, up and down a couple more times, then flew away like normal. I’d never seen them do that before or after. I assume he must have been getting the settings right for the unusually unbalanced load.
Is it rude to say, “You know what? I think I’ll walk.”
My coworker who was on that flight was really anxious about it. I was pretty confident that it was just a matter of balancing the load.
In those days I was getting to take the helicopter for a meeting with every other week, and it was always the highlight of the week. Those things are just so damned fun. They can clearly haul a lot more weight than a cab full of people.