groundling
Heliman
Location: St. Paul, Minn., USA
| Benson GyrocopterJust thought I'd chime in with a reminiscence. I'm not a pilot...
Harry Wittmer was good friend of mine, more like an uncle, who hired me to work in his Suburban Camera Shop in La Grange, Ill. (suburban Chicago) at age 16 in 1958. He had been a private pilot as well as a photographer and Lake Michigan sailor, loved gadgets, and taught me a lot about photography, acetylene-torch cutting, risk-taking and seat-of-the-pants engineering and mechanics. His British-born wife taught me something about good business sense and proper English.
Harry built a Benson (Bensen?) Gyrocopter in 1967 and became a dealer. I don't know that he ever sold any units, but he plunged into the gyrocopter world with both feet. I had enlisted in the Army Reserve and spent half that year in basic and advanced training, so I missed hanging around with him during much of the time he was building the gyrocopter, but in October 1967, after I got off active duty, I made several trips with him to a grass airstrip west of Chicago. I drove his Rambler station wagon towing him in unpowered tests, and he showed me how carefully he had constructed the thing, with all the nuts wired, etc. You're right -- it looked like a lawn chair tied to a clothes pole or something.
The last weekend I saw him, we tested the engine he had added -- a 90-hp. McCulloch two-cycle, which turned a pusher prop and sounded like a chain saw on steroids -- and taxied the thing, and I think I towed him aloft without the copter powered. He didn't try a powered flight that day, either because the wind wasn't right or because the engine -- as I recall -- was sputtering like crazy. I wouldn't have trusted it, I'll tell you. I did get some nice pictures of Harry in the thing. He had the utmost pride and confidence in it -- said that if the engine quit in midair it would float back down like a maple seed.
The next weekend, I drove up to the Twin Cities in Minnesota to line up an apartment because I was starting a new job there in November. When I got home, my parents told me Harry had taken his gyrocopter up under power for the first time and crashed. He was killed instantly. I never heard the official report; his wife told me he took off, got up to about 100 feet and dove straight in. For some reason, the authorities hauled the wreckage back to their house and put it in the garage, much to her distress. I saw it, too.
I guess I was lucky I went out of town, or I undoubtedly would've seen the crash. I wish I'd tried to talk him out of flying the thing, but I guess he died doing something he loved. He was 55; I was 25.
Dick Parker, St. Paul, Minn. |
