We gave at least 30 MIT students rides on Labor Day. An interested photo is on the front page of the September 8, 2006 Tech. The fly-in inspired me to write http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/helicopter-landing-zone
5 thoughts on “Follow-up to MIT helicopter fly-in”
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My personal favorite dumb idea that I saw all the time at medivac LZ’s at accident scenes was the fire department pulling a hose line off of the engine, right next to were the helicopter is supposed to land. Like the helicopter is going to touch down and burst into flames. This effectively immobilized the fire engine so if there was a crash on takeoff or landing, it was stuck.
Having been up close and personal to two helicopter crashes I can testify that you don’t want to be anywhere near all of the flying parts coming off of the aircraft.
I can tell plenty of stories of bad LZ setups. Done quite a few myself. The most common errors I saw was setting up LZs where there was debris such as dirt or sand, or to much slope. Just about everyone gets the big open area figured out.
Did you fly over Marblehead today? After all, how many four-place, yellow Robinsons can there be in the Boston area?
MC —
that was Philip taking his sister (yours truly) and his nephew out for their first helicopter ride. It was absolutely gorgeous. Begin to understand how Isak Dinesen must have felt when that adventurer took her up in his plane to see the African plain which she loved so. (see “Out of Africa” for the truly tearful version) We only saw one other craft the whole trip. Airplanes aren’t allowed in that airspace over the city, and, according to Philip, Boston isn’t perceived to be worthy of a city tour via helicopter the way Manhattan is — and apparently Boston doesn’t have easy-access downtown helioports, necessitating taking off from the suburbs (Hanscom in Bedford) as we did today.
Thanks for the link to The Tech- nice picture of the yellow helicopter against the modern dorm background.
As an aside, I couldn’t help but notice that based on the Tech ads, it appears the only jobs available to MIT grads these day are with large banks. Of course, this has been well-covered on your site, but you would think at least a couple of firms would be looking for engineers to do…. engineering.
Question that might want a little clarification:
I’ve been looking a bit at issues in helicopter simulation, and one of the references is that different surfaces, ie: grass versus pavement, do different things to ground effect. Debris blowing around is one thing, and you prefer pavement over grass, but are there other issues?