Dangerous Creature

Alyssa and I had a long conversation last night, and curiously, she was very supportive of my decision to cancel my trip to Paris and instead get my helicopter pilot license. I was a bit surprised, I imagined she would worried of being by herself in a city where she does not speak the language and knows very few people.

But now I'm getting really worried after I found these photos on the helicopter flight school website. After all, I might go to Paris rather than risking clipping my rotor with this dangerous creature.

My New Sikorsky Helicopter

I found this really cool (real) helicopter on sale on eBay. Very cheap, nice orange paint, Russian made Sikorsky (just a little bit too large to fit in my garage). The Russian guy who was selling it was super nice, so I bought it with "Buy it Now", and I'll use it to practice my real helicopter piloting skills (tired of flying that toy). It should not be that hard, since I already have my glider and private airplane pilot licence, plus a hang-gliding qualification (validated by a broken arm). So I enrolled in this crash-course for helicopter piloting at the Concord airport flight school, for the next two to three weeks. Unfortunately I had to cancel my Christmas trip to Paris, but I figured I have better chances to survive helicopter flight training than travelling with Alyssa :)

Tiny remote controled helicopters

A couple of days ago I was at a party where a couples a geeky guys were playing with tiny remote-controled helicopters toys. They were a few inches in diameter, extremely light and almost silent (powered by batteries). Although extremely hard to control due to their small size and their lack of inertia because of their extremely light weight, they were a lot of fun to play with, so I decided to get one! I followed the advice of one of the guys and got a dual-rotor model, which is more stable and easier to control than the single rotor design.
After a few hours of playing with the toy and crashing in counteless times, I'm now able to do (almost) controled flights around the rooms in my apartment, and even fly the chopper from room to room. What's really amazing is that they were able to build such a complex machine with a very simple and very light design, and make it extremely robust (it survives the hardest crashes). The rechargeable battery allows flights up to about 5 minutes. The three brushless electrical engines powering the chopper are extremely small yet very powerful and very efficient. Amazing technology, worth the $50 or so (i think you can get it for less on-line).