V-22 Osprey is the Cover Story for the Current Issue of Time Magazine

The Ercoupe was designed to be operated more like a car than a aircraft:

Pat

No - not that everyone should be flying, but that flying should be accessible to everyone as a form of public transportation.

...maybe not:

yeah, i wanna take the 8:15 helibus to the office.

it won't pass a smog. damned epa and thier no nukes on cars bullshit.

Lindberg. It was very simple and the cockpit windows were raised lines on the fuselage.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

Can I buy your helibus? Too much! The Helibus!

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

I'd catch that bus three times a day...

Pat Flannery wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

Yes I have one. Don't rememeber the maker, it's packed away. Rough and basic, canopy is part of fuselage and therefore not clear. It looks like the pictures I suppose. Even has decals.

Like the military version at Wiki, didn't know that. Gives me an idea...

Frank

FWIW: not all Starship's were leased. I didn't know Rutan had one, but if he did he turned it in. He hired Bob Scherer to fly chase during SpaceShipOne missions. Scherer has 3 of the birds (i think) and purchased several truckloads of spares from Raytheon to keep 'em going. He was also in a documentary about the Starship on Discovery or History Channel a couple of years ago

I didn't realize that Rutan had a hand in the design of the aircraft until some years ago - and a friend of mine that's more in the know had told me he had owned one, so it would make sense that he would hang onto it - I know I would have. Makes sense for the purchased ones...I know I used to see the odd one in Trade-a-Plane from time to time, but that was some years ago.

I know Raytheon/Beech supposedly cut up the ones they took back, so spares should have been available by the truckload to the proper bidder.

He thought the technology was still decades away; apparently it's not. You take such a remote control insect flier, stick a little needle on the front carrying a hard-to-detect toxin, and you've got yourself a great little covert assassination weapon - particularly if it hits the target at night, and the poison doesn't take effect till hours or days later. The CIA developed a special pistol back in the 1970s to silently fire a dart shaped like a tiny desert fly into a person and transmit a deadly disease to them and kill them after a few days. If these robotic dragonflies really exist, we may have come up with something very similar to the Hunter-Seeker out of Frank Herbert's "Dune" novels.

Pat

that's the one i saw. he should keep his flying for the foreseeable future.

Found some photos of the kit here:

lindberg had a buttload of very simple kits of private ac. they are easily bashed as they are the correct shapes and dimensions.

...if you can think of it, someone's probably already done it. Or is working on doing it.

When I was about six or so, I drew up a sketch (that I still have) of a boat to use to clean up oil spills - oil floats on water, so I figured why not just scoop it up? What I drew was essentially a catamaran with a v-shaped scoop in the center that would be driven into the oil slick, and then the scoop could be turned upright...water would just be drained out of the bottom of the v, and the oil could be reclaimed.

Imagine my shock when I saw a fleet of just such reclamation vessels in operation off the coast of Japan on the evening news some 30 years later, a bit smaller than I had envisioned at six years old...where's my money?..

I had that one as a kid. I knew it had some animal the hunters had bagged, but forgot what it was.

Pat

Me too, they looked like something done by another manufacturer, almost like a little give-away item with a product of some sort. Detail was poor, and the rivets huge. Some relation to the Eldon "Match Kits" done in Hong Kong, Japan, or Taiwan?

Pat

everyday somewhere in the universe, someone is inventing gun powder.

-a e van vogt, the weapon shops of isher