Flutterby™! : heliporn

Philip Greenspun's notes on preparing a helicopter landing zone had an interesting picture of a Kaman K-Max heavy lift helicopter. I hadn't seen one before, so I went on a search.

It's got two contra-rotating main rotors, intermeshed, and angled out so that the blade of each passes over the hub of the other. No anti-torque rotor. Single pilot, some sources make reference to optional side passenger pod. Burning eighty some-odd gallons of fuel per hour it can lift 5,000 lbs at 10k feet.

Philip's picture is of one of Superior Helicopter's beasties. Here are some pictures of Mountain West Helicopter's K-Max at Colorado's Snaking Fire. And the obligatory airliners.net page and, of course, the Kaman Aerospace K-Max overview.

And the abstract for Analyses of Parameters Affecting Helicopter Timber Extraction says of tests using a K-Max:

The inexperienced helicopter pilot had timber extraction experience but just 30 flight hours on the K-Max while the experienced pilot had 22,000 K-Max flight hours. The experienced pilot yielded a 0.37 m3/min increase in productivity, which is a 63% increase at an average piece size of 1.5 m3.

Unfortunately, there are too many variables in 30 versus 22,000 hours on a given aircraft, and too much range in the sample, to derive anything too useful from that, but I wonder what the economics are of pilots flying a twelve hundred dollar per hour machine, and of 63% differences in extraction rates...

And while I don't mean to give it short shrift down here at the end, I notice through one of Larry's random pictures that he's got a gallery of a visit to a helicopter museum that looks pretty darned cool.