Now, we are going to ask you a few simple questions...
Hands up all those of you who were reading W3MH back in July 1996. Hmmm. Perhaps I'd better rephrase that. How many of you have read the July 1996 issue? Actually, I thought that I had written that cr... er, prose much more recently than that. Do you remember the bit about those people who use just a little more than the usual six senses. OK, maybe you didn't get my drift, but that's what it was about.
So, I had two interesting experiences today. Putting the cart before the horse, I'll tell you about the second first (have you got that - splendid!).
This evening I watched on television one of the young up-and-coming (actually, he's already there) snooker players, Ronnie O'Sullivan, play the old master, Steve Davis (well, he's nearly forty). If you haven't seen Ronnie play, he is the absolute personification of the old gunfighters rule, 'shoot first and aim afterward'.
For the first four frames he simply potted everything on the table apparently without even looking. They had an interval and Mr Davis won the next four frames. Perhaps I should point out that it was a 19 frame match (in other words the first man to 10 wins). Following a much longer interval, Ronnie repeated the act and won four frames in a row at astonishing speed. He then looked as if he had just run a marathon.
Steve Davis then proceeded to win six frames in a row and the match.
The people in the studio who are supposed to know about such things kept referring to, "tremendous natural talent", etc. Well, they were partly right. No-one seemed to have noticed the tremendous toll that a few minutes work seemed to put on Ronnie and the fact that he was just about useless afterwards. .
Around mid-day I watched one of our young flyers putting a Bergen 'Gas Intrepid' through its paces. Some of the things that he was doing with the machine were quite indescribable, so I won't attempt the impossible. Now, the redoubtable Curtis Y can make quite an impression, but most of the things that he does follow some predefined formula and can be described in recognisable terms. In other words, 'backwards loop', 'rolling loop', 'pirouetting loop', 'sideways roll', etc. They call it freestyle, but when you think about it, it isn't is it?
What Le... er, the young flyer was doing defies description as I have already said. I have often wondered how Curtis manages to get his head around some of the things that he does, but what I saw today makes me realise that isn't even the start of the problem. It seems to me that, like the gunfighter, it's a question of doing it and thinking about it afterwards. If you think first, like most of us, you are already lost.
I could go on like this all day, but there is nothing to be gained by labouring the point. On 'Babylon 5', these people would be known as 'teeks', while Anne McCaffrey would label them 'T1', 'T2', 'T3', etc (I love throwing in cryptic references).
Tony, try looking up 'telekinesis' in your dictionary.
What the papers say
Have you noticed (why the hell do I keep asking questions, when nobody answers?) that the few surviving UK model magazines that still depend on destroying trees seem to have reached an all-time low in terms of literacy? The one devoted to heli matters is beginning to rival, or outdo, its fixed wing stablemates which have never had much to crow about anyway.
Its fairly obvious that someone is letting his spell checker have too much of its own way (perhaps the spell checker actually reads the stuff). We are constantly being treated to such delights as 'swash plate' (positively Dickensian that - it must be the thing that they give you in the workhouse to eat your daily ration of swash off), 'bell crank' (does your bell have a crank, or is your bell cranked - have you ever seen a cranked bell?), 'ball race' (my ball's faster than yours), or 'side frame' (so you can tell the difference from the top frame or the bottom frame which all helicopters have, of course). The latest revelation concerns a 'flexi plate' head (not sure whether flexi is what it's made of, or whether it's a trade name).
The latest cover shot features a tank with the fuel apparently running up hill (well, if he can walk on water...). Also note the continuing use of the company trademark of putting text on a background that makes it unreadable. To make things worse, poor old bottomless still doesn't know his inverted commas from his parenthesis. Someone should tell him that block capitals make poor old literate even more ill. The latest jewel of helicopter orientated information appears to concern the fact that VDU's are difficult to photograph. Well yes, if you use a flashgun and leave the lights on (no, it's not either/or, it's neither).
Feedback
I had a nice email from Erik Anstrom to assure me that I had one reader (it's a start). Erik too wonders if anybody actually reads this stuff and suggests that we ask Ken Rudd to do a reader survey on it. Not a bad idea, perhaps the first question should be whether they are genuine subscribers.
I must confess that I didn't reply to Kens questionnaire. My feelings at the time were that he would not get enough answers to be useful. I really didn't realise that he had gone rather farther with its distribution than just the readers of this magazine. In the circumstances, the fact that he only got 75 replies anyway probably tells us an awful lot. Perhaps heli flyers in general don't respond to these things. Maybe they just spend their time submitting silly questions to newsgroups.
Another reason why I didn't respond is because I really couldn't decide whether I should send in one reply with a list of helis, or whether I should send one reply per heli. Sorry Ken. Erik also suggested that a UFO might produce a trail of ionised air and that a heli flying through this air might experience a flame-out. On the occasion that I saw a UFO while flying a heli, I didn't experience a fame-out, but I wasn't flying that particular model, so who knows.