TechStuff Classic: How Helicopters Work

helicopters fly by beating the air into submission. So, without further ado, let's get to chop off. We're gonna talk about helicopters today. Yes, and it's rising that we haven't talked about it before. Yeah. Well, when you start looking into what is involved in making a helicopter work, I can see exactly why we haven't done it before. Well, you know the helicopter business US have it have its ups and down. Yeah. Nice, I like how you did that.

Um yeah, So so let's talk about helicopters. So, I'm sure all of you are familiar with the concept of a helicopter, but when did these things? How did how did we come up with this idea? When did this originally spring to mind. Okay, well, uh, you know, it is something that has been on my mind since I

was a kid. I've always loved helicopters. So the other day Jonathan sent me a video that I couldn't watch because my current bandwidth was too low on my Internet connection, and it took me two days to actually watch it. But it was a video of some very tiny quadricopters. Yeah, they were called nano quadricopters in the video itself, although that is a misnomer since nano typically means one billion. And they were not that small. No, they fit on

the palm of someone's hand. Yeah, they're about the size of the palm of your hand. And uh, I was thinking about how, uh, how unusual the quadracopter is because it doesn't have a tail roader like a traditional helicopter does. Um. Yeah, they're very very maneuverable. Um and uh and I thought, you know, hey, Jonathan, why don't we talk about helicopters because we never really talked about them before. So, right, so that's how I came to mind. Yeah, that's how

I came to mind. Now, how how the idea of a helicopter actually came to mind for human beings in general. That dates back pretty far in human history. And it all begins with a toy. Yeah, you know, and I think just about everybody who's gone to their school fair or whatever is one one of these little you know, seventy two cent uh stick with a propeller on it and you spin in the palm of your hand and let go and it'll fly up and then crash down

to the earth. But they weren't always made from plastic, no, No, they were. The Chinese had a little top that they used where the top was had feathers on it, Yes, and it did the same sort of thing. You would put a put the stick between your hands, the feathers will be at the top. You spin the stick very quickly. The feathers would spin and it would create some lift and the sick would fly up in the air and then come back down. Pretty simple, yep. And as it

turns out to the concept is is pretty simple. Basically, you're you're creating an air foil. Yes, Um that instead of like an airplane wing where you're going forward, Um, it is going straight up simply because um, the the air that that moves over the air foil, it creates

lift is taking it straight up instead of forward. Yes, So I guess to to really kind of discuss this, we should probably talk about a little bit about the parts of a helicopter, so that way we can explain what these these parts actually do and how they achieve flight. So the blades that we talk about, that's a rotor, right, So the rotors are affixed to a rotor mast. That's the part that actually creates the the turning motion, and

that makes the blades go round in a circle. And the blades themselves are angled and they can that angle can change depending upon a control um. There are different control rods that can change the the um the attitude of those blades. So you have, uh, two of them. Actually there's the cyclic controller which can control them individually. Yes, that's also known as the stick, right, Yeah, that's the that's the stick. And then there's a was it the

collective one, right, yes, the collective pitch lever. What that does is it actually changes the attitude of all of the rotors, the main rotors at the same time. Um. And that both of those are important for various maneuvers with the helicopter. But we'll get into that in a second. There's also with the rotors, there's a a stabilizer. Because you've got these long air foils that are extending out

from a shaft and they're turning around and around. There's a chance that they're gonna start, you know, flopping around a little bit, causing some issues, you know, of the stabilizer is there to help add some rigidity there so that these blades will will maintain the right shape so that you can fly. It's kind of funny too, because apparently it was just one of those things that someone added to the helicopter um uh And as as it turns out, it it made a major improvement in the

stability and and flyability of helicopters. Yeah, the early helicopters when they were flying, it was a pretty bumpy ride and it was definitely a challenge for a pilot to maintain control because it just you know, without that stabilizer, it just like you were saying, it just wasn't as fliable. So it was definitely a good addition to the parts of a helicopter. There's a there's a there are two plates they are on the rotor mast, all right, that

that also are a big part of the helicopter. It's called the upper swash plate and the lower swash plate. And despite what you might think, they are not joined by a swash buckle. Instead, if you imagine that, they imagine two plates to two round plates, right, and they're both they both have the the shaft of the motor of the rotor rather goes straight through these two plates.

The lower plate is stationary, it does not turn. On top of the lower plate are ball bearings, yes, And then on top of the ball bearings is the upper swashplate, which does turn. The ball bearings are what allow it

to turn over. The lower swashplate, now the swashplate. The reason that's important is remember when I was talking about the collective the collective control that changes the attitude of all the blades at the same time that what that actually does is it allows that plate to tilt either forward or backward, or however you need it to, so that you can make the helicopter veer in the direction you want it to go. Because really, until this point,

what we were doing was going up and down. We weren't going left or right, or over that way or back this way. Because if you try, if you have one of those toys that we were talking about before. With the blade on the stick, you point it straight up and it goes straight up, and then it'll drift off a little bit to the side, but you don't really control that. If you pointed it, you know at your friend, it's going to go in his or her direction. And that's what the swash plates allow the pilot of

the helicopter to do it. It helps filp the blades and and the helicopter starts flying in that direction. Yes, because it adds it adds a second element. Right, you first have the first element you have is lift, Right, The second element you would have is thrust. Yes, so when you start to change the attitude of the blades,

you have both lift and thrust. Now, there is a point where if you were to tilt that beyond a certain threshold, you would no longer have enough lift to counteract the weight of the helicopter itself, and it would start to lose altitude. They might be moving forward, but it's going to be going lower and lower until you correct that. And that's one of the reasons why UH piloting a helicopter is so challenging. In fact, when we

get into the different controls. You'll find out you're using both your legs and both your arms to try and maneuver a helicopter, and so it takes a lot of concentration. Yeah. Yeah, it's also why you don't see a lot of people flying helicopters and loop to loops. Yeah, that's let's their air wolf that right. Yeah, but then no, that is true because once you get beyond that certain threshold, you no longer have the lift necessary to keep you in

the air. Uh. And these blades are connected to that rotor mast through blade grips, that's the technical term for where the blades fit into this rotor mast. And on the very top of the rotor mast, you have something that's that's got an interesting name. Yes, the Jesus nut. Yes, it really is called that. It's called the Jesus nut. And uh, there are various furies as to why it's called that, and I don't know what any of I don't know the truth of any of them. Yes, the

one that we have an article on the site. Yes, it's a it's a really good article too, with lots of really helpful illustrations. So if you are interested in helicopters and you really want to get a look at what these different parts look like. I highly recommend you check it out because it's it's one of the more exhaustive articles on the site. I would say, yeah, I would, I would agree with that and very very illustrative what you're doing here when you're flying a helicopter. Um. So, yeah,

we were talking about the tail rotor just a moment ago. Yes, Um, very important in the in the design of a helicopter. So here's another thing about helicopters. You've got this blade turning around and around, this creating lift, and when the lift gets strong enough to counteract the weight of the helicopter is going to rise in the air. Without a

tail rotor. Yeah, if you've ever wondered why that's there. Yeah, without a tail rotor, which is that little, that little smaller propeller that's on the end of the tail of a helicopter. Without it, the body of the helicopter itself would start spin in a direction opposite that of the rotors. So if the rotors are spinning in a clockwise direction, then the helicopter will start to spin in a wider Shian's direction. You just wanted to use, Yes, I did

so badly counterclockwise. For those of you who do not speak archaic English, hey, where are my Shakespeare Homi's at So anyway, Yes, the the helicopter would spin without any other other force to counteract this, the helicopter would start to spin in the opposite direction, which would probably be an unpleasant experience for anyone inside that helicopter. Yes, yeah, so the rotor What that does is it helps to create thrust to counteract the spinning motion so that the

helicopter stays stationary. And by controlling the speed of that rotor, you can actually turn the helicopter to the left or to the right, not banking it. But actually if you're in if you're hovering in place, you can change the speed that that rotor turns and then turn your helicopter so it's facing an opposite direction, so if it started facing north, you can maybe face west. That kind of thing. And of course, uh, for for this, we have a a guy named Igor to to thank for that. Yes,

Igor did a great job. Of all the people who experimented with the idea of being able to levitate a person, I mean there were there were many, including a our our friend Leo, Yeah, Leonardo da Vinci yea. Yeah, he tried to create something that he called the air screw, which was a screw shape, and the idea was that with four people powering this man powered, of course back in Leo's day, that if you were able to turn this air screw fast enough, it would be able to

create enough lift to lift the machine off the ground. Now, he never got this to work, but it was sort of the basis of the idea of what would eventually become a helicopter, although it changed dramatically by the time the helicopter actually appeared. Yep. Now, Igor Sikorsky, if you spend any time at all paying attention to helicopters, that

name is going to be very familiar to you. Um was a Russian who experimented with the idea of helicopters and then kind of moved away to get into other types of airplane flight and then sort of came back to it later on. Yea, His early attempts were not met with very much success. Now, so he decided, hey, you know what, let's just put this on the back burner and look at something that I know will work. And then eventually, once he felt more confident, he revisited

this idea of the helicopter. Yeah, back in the around the nineteen thirties, I think is when when he started really having some luck with it and he realized that he was going to need something to prevent the helicopter body from spinning like that without any kind of force. So he decided to mount a tail rotor on his helicopter too. And basically it's it's creating force in a sideways manner that that is resisting the force that that would naturally cause the helicopter to turn. So um, you know,

hats off to igor. Yeah, and that was a brilliant idea. It was the nineteen thirty nine when he created the VS three hundred, which was based off these early designs, and it actually worked. It lifted him up into the air. It was a bit of a bumpy ride. But then he ended up trying to uh, you know, he refined the design of it and then um, actually had broke a record. On May six one, he broke the world helicopter endurance record and stayed in the air for one hour,

thirty two minutes and twenty six point one seconds. And yeah, that's that's pretty impressive. I mean, for for an invention that people had played with for centuries really, but no one had really cracked it. It was a big jump. And speaking of jumps, we should say that between the time of the the top toy that was invented in ancient China and the time that Sikorski created the first working helicopter, there were a lot of other people who were involved in trying to make this work, and some

of their contributions led into Sikorski's work. Yes, but a lot of these early inventions that were created we call them hoppers because they could they could lift off the ground briefly, but they couldn't really sustain flight for any length of time, and they didn't really have any way of changing the direction of that flight. It just would go up and down, I mean, apart from being pushed around by whatever wind happened to be in the area. Yeah,

being pushed around by wind, that's not a problem. But then so he breaks the record. It turns out that, you know, the helicopters would become really important in warfare. That actually became a very uh well, the United States in particular really dependent upon helicopters in conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Hey, you know I've seen mash Yeah, yeah, it starts off with one through early morning guy. See uh yeah, And this was this was a pretty interesting development.

I mean you see a lot of of the experimental aircraft from that era just became oddities. Yes, yes, which you can still find autogyros. And we should explain what the difference between an autogyro and a helicopter is. So with a helicopter, those rotors were talking about, those are powered that that rotor mast turns underpower. There's an engine

and a transmission. The engine provides power, transmission converts it over into the mechanical energy that the rotors need in order to turn, and that is what makes the the blades turn fast enough to create the lift. Autogyros have unpowered rotors, so there is a there there is a set of rotors on top of an autogyro, so in a way it kind of resembles like a miniature helicopter. But then there's a propeller that's either in the front

or the back of the autogyro. It all depends on the design of a specific autogyro, which what that's what provides thrust and what happens is it generates an air flow that is directed up at the rotors that are above the autogyro, and that that upward flowing amount of air is what makes the blades start to turn. And you just keep increasing the air flow, which again makes the blades turn faster until that helps counteract the weight of the autogyro. And that's what allows the autogyro to fly.

But there's no motor turning those blades. It's all just from the flow of air. Yeah. As a matter of fact, some now, some of the more modern helicopters also have a second engine, which can help you know, of course if in the case of the first engine going out, um but you know there there's some redundancy there, uh now in the more modern helicopters, especially for military helicopters that might be affected by enemy fire. Right sure, Yeah, you have an engine failure, then you can switch over

to a second engine and hopefully prevent catastrophe. So let's talk a little bit about the controls that are inside a helicopter. Of course, you have lots of different um uh dials and indicators that give you information about the environment and uh information about your helicopter's performance. Those are all there's they're too numerous to name, really, but the actual controls. When we were talking about using both your hands and both your feet, well, one hand is gonna

be on that cyclic pitch lever. So this is the lever that controls the angle of each of the rotor blades individually. And uh this one is used mainly to tilt the craft at either side or forward and backward. But it's it's done in uh very it's not it's it's not the one that changes the swashplate. That's the collective pitch leaver. So that's that's your second one that you're holding with your other hand. Um. It's mainly used

things like take off and landing. It's used to increase or decrease the pitch of all the rotor blades at the same time. And it's mostly responsible for up and down movements, not things like forward, backward, left, right. Uh. Then you've got your foot pedals and these are what control the tail rotor, and so using the the tail rotors, this is how you can turn the the helicopter so it faces a different direction. You're not banking it, but you're turning it. Um or you're using it just to

keep it steady. Uh. And and if you're wondering, you know, well, what about hovering? Isn't that easy? No, Hovering is actually pretty difficult to do because you have to you have to get everything in a neutral position, and then you have to keep making minor adjustments in order to maintain the position that you're in. In fact, pilots will have to pick a spot that they can look at and try and maintain their attitude and altitude uh by by

referencing where that spot is and making minor adjustments constantly. Yes. Yeah, and it helps to uh to have um uh an experienced pilot on board, just because not only is there the matter of looking at the electronic components in the craft itself, but to orient him or herself with the land around, just to to give a visual representation of what's going on. And that's that's one of those things that's especially important. Because the wind does blow helicopters around.

You have to take these things into into account, and um one of the best ways to do that is to use that visual orientation to make sure that you haven't drifted off to some degree. Now, let's talk really quickly about what the process is like if you are taking off helicopter, So there's several steps. First, what you would have to do is you have to open up the throttle that you and speed up these rotors so that they start turning out a speed fast enough to

create the amount of lift you need. UM you do this by actually twisting the handle of one of the levers you're holding in your hands and twisting it one way opens the throttle and twisting it the other way closes the throttle. So that's you know, that's essentially like

sitting stepping on the accelerator of a of an automobile. UM. So the next what you would do, once you've got the the rotors moving at the right speed, you'd start to pull back on the collective control and that's what's going to raise the swashplate assembly and that's going to change the pitch of the rotor blades, and then that's what's going to let you direct that lift the in the right direction so that you can actually get off

the ground. Then you would start to press down on the left foot pedal because you would need to get the tail rotor spinning so that you could counteract that torque. We we're talking about the the the tendency for the chassis to spend in the opposite direction of the rotors. Right as soon as you're lifting off the ground, you're going to be it's going to be much easier for the rotors to start to spin the body of the helicopter,

the fuselage. Yes, so if you weren't, if you were not making that rotor tail rotor spin, you would start to go on a little spinny spinny d it yourself, which would most likely end in disaster. Yeah, so yeah, you you then would start to actually add a counteractive thrust through the tail rotor by pressing down that left pedal. Now, if you got to a point where you needed to turn or you need to slow that down, you could stop pressing down the left pedal and start pressing down

the right pedal, and that's what would counteract that. Um. Then you keep pulling back on that collective control while holding down the left foot pedal, and once the correct amount of lift is created, your helicopter will leave the ground and you'll be flying over the air and delivering traffic reports like nobody's business. All right, let's uh, let's take a quick break. I'm still recovering from my truly awful and unrecognizable Schwarzenegger uh impersonation. Let's take a quick

break to think our sponsors. Yeah, it's um, it's pretty interesting. Uh. And there's even other challenges to flying a helicopter, right, I mean, not only is it requiring a lot of coordination, but even just the way that the air flight works. When you start traveling, say forward, you're moving forward at at around UM twenty knots of airspeed, you have to end up transitioning, transitioning from hovering, which is more or less staying fairly stationary, to moving on a full forward

flight phase. And there's that's where you have the effective translational lift or et L. And at that point the pilot would start to ease up on that left foot pedal and move closer to a neutral setting. And there's gonna be a shutter that you'd feel through the rotor system because you are going to fly out of what is called rotor wash. And rotor wash is not where you go to a place where people start pouring sud sea water all over your rotor blades and then squirt

them down. It's not that's not a rotor wash. Rotor wash is actually turbulence which is created by these rotor blades turning so quickly, and you fly through your own turbulence. Then once you get to a certain angle, that turbulence is not no longer directed in your flight path, and

you end up having this much more smooth experience. So before you hit that, that flying in that helicopter might feel a little well, pardon the pun, but choppy, because you just you know, you're actually flying through turbulence that

you have created through the helicopter itself. Um. By the way, I don't know if you've ever heard this, but I have friends who were in the Marines, and they said that the way the Marines would explain helicopters, as they say, helicopters fly by beating the air into submission, which is a very Marines kind of thing, Simper five. So the yeah, it's a it's a pretty interesting method of flight. It's

amazing to me even seeing them now. I mean, you can see them helicopters outside the windows of our office fairly frequently. We're in a part of Atlanta where we'll

see traffic helicopters or news helicopters fly overhead. Um and In fact, when the article was being written for the site, Marshall Brain, the founder of how Stuff Works, had contacted a company in Atlanta that did helicopter tours and helicopter pilots worked for him and managed to get the president of the company to agree to fly a helicopter so that we could get some video, which led to one of the more famous incidents and how stuff works, where

this helicopter pilot uh flew relatively close to the building and anyone who was on our floor knew what was going on, well not even everyone here. Most of the people knew what was going on, but anyone on any other floor had no idea. And I'm pretty sure we terrified half of an office building. Sorry about that, but it was Marshall Brain who did that, um so, not us, not us. But yeah, we've got some pretty cool footage

from those videos. I mean, how could you not. We have some pretty cool footage from those videos that are part of this article. So if you want to see what I'm talking about in action, go to how stuff works dot com look up how helicopters work. And we have other articles about helicopters as well, including specific ones like how the Apache helicopter works, which goes into more

detail about other systems besides the flight control system. It's also got weapons systems and its role in military applications, where of course just really focusing on the basics of helicopter flight. But let's also talk now, do you have anything else you want to talk about specifically about helicopters before I move on to quadrocopters. Um, no, go ahead, okay, So quadricopters, Now, if you haven't seen one of these, these tend to be these little uh unmanned aerial vehicles

that have four rotor systems on them. Yeah, the ones I've seen have been primarily for models for entertainment purposes. Yeah, our C controlled ones or sometimes that you can control them through a smartphone. In our RC episode we talked a little bit about them. What are you when are you grinning out? Someone's going to write in about RC controlled I'm sorry, control can stop by over my a t M machine with my PIN number, and I've got an r C controlled helicopter. How about that? How about

them apples? Then? Anyway? Yes? I okay, so anyway, Yes, there's also ones that you can control with your smartphone. The parrot a r drone which was at c S the first time I think was maybe three or four years ago, and that was very impressive to see. That was the first time I had ever seen a four rotor h copter, a quadricopter. And uh, you might wonder, well, how do these things work. They don't have a tail rotor. There's no tail rotors, so how do they counteract that

torque we were talking about. It's actually pretty clever. Two of the rotors on a quadricopter turn in one direction and the other turn to turn in the other direction, and they cancel each other out, yes, the opposite. They both produce enough torque so that you can keep the quadricopter from turning in place, either one way or the other.

And when I say you, I don't really mean you, because most of these have pretty sophisticated microprocessors on board that really register, measure the amount of torque and all the other elements here so that they can make adjustments to the speed of each of those rotors in or to maintain the proper attitude and altitude of that device.

So all you have to do is say I want you to go over there, and then all these other microprocessors do everything that they can to make that happen while keeping it nice and safe, which is pretty cool. I mean you you know, you think about all the work that they have to do in order for that to to turn out that way. Well, there are lots of different kinds of quadricopters, and if you do want to make it turn like if you want to make

it bank one way or the other. Again, what happens is it the quadricopter adjust the speed at which certain rotors are spinning, so the lift changes exactly, Yes, the lift changes and the torque changes, so the two together can make you stray fit to the left or to the right, or forward or backwards. I've even seen, I mean, we've seen some that can do flips because what they'll do is they'll is one side will spin very very

quickly while the other side stops spinning. It'll lift up into the air, and then they'll switch the directions of the rotors so that it flips it in mid air and lands back, you know, right side up with all

rotors going, so it goes back into flying. And the video that we were talking about at the very top of this podcast, it was a little unnerving really because we were seeing groups of these quadricopters that were all following the same program, and you could have them grouped into individual little squadrons, like squadrons of four quadricopters, and I think there was something like, uh, they were using

twelve and all. So they had three groups of four and they would send the three groups of four through and through an obstacle course and they would maneuver past each other, but they would all the four quadricopters would move as a single unit, which was kind of creepy, you know, to see something move like several small things all moving together as one like that was a little odd. And they can make a move through things like windows, which was way griev er. Yeah, I got I got

these images of of drones coming into your house. Hello Mr Smith, Yeah, we have something we'd like to say to you, Oh skynet. Yeah, no, it's a yeah, your water bill. While we hover around the topic of helicopters, it's time for us to take another break to thank our sponsor. So the video we're talking about specifically, and I'll try and link to this when we do some show notes, is called precise aggressive maneuvers for autonomous quad quad rotors. Quadt I was gonna say quadrocopters but spelled

quad rotors and it totally threw me off. But this was done through the GRASP Lab g r a s P at the University of Pennsylvania. Yeah, that's a general robotics Automation Sensing and Perception. Yeah, so this particular video shows these uh, these tiny quadricopters moving through various maneuvers. What's interesting here is that the one I'm looking at right now, like it's this is one of those videos that just got really popular all of a sudden, right

like that. Several of our listeners are watching listeners, um are Yeah, but the video that I'm looking at right now was uploaded so two years ago and we're just now starting to catch on it. Sometimes the Internet is a little slow to catch on the memes, That's what

I'm saying. But yeah, this was something that started to make it make the rounds and uh and on Google Plus and on Facebook recently and Twitter as well, and uh, just one of those cool things that it turns out it's been in the works for a few years, but we just started to get the attention of the world in general. But it shows a really interesting approach to programming these quadricopters and showing their capabilities and what they

might be used for. And you might think, okay, well, you know, you put a camera on these and then suddenly you've got a spy plane. But you could also have it for something like first responders. So there's a let's say there's an accident and you send some of these in uh that to in order to to scan the scene and make sure that one it's safe enough to send in an emergency response teams, and to whether or not it's even necessary to start send an emergency

response teams. You may send in. Let's say there's a building that's that's on fire, and you send some of these over to look because I mean, these things, relatively to a human life, are cheap. They're nothing. So you can make as many of these as you like. They're gonna be. They might be a little expensive, but it's less expensive than losing a human life. So you send these things in and take a look around. It may turn out that, well, you know what, that building was

completely abandoned. There was no one in there, So we don't need to risk the lives of any emergency responders. We can just use the firefighters to try and put this fire out. So that's the kind of idea that we'd be looking at from that point forward. And there's a lot of other possibilities, Um besides that. I mean that's traffic, you know, having them look at traffic, things like that. That's these are all possibilities. No, granted, you have to figure out how to supply the power to

these things. Most of them are battery operated, and the battery will only last so long. So it's not like you would send out, you know, wake up, punch the clock, send out fifty quadricopters to cover the city and then at the end of the day they all come back. Uh, So you know, it's not like it's a it's a it's not like you can solve all the problems just by sitting out quatricopters. But it's a cool idea and

the videos are pretty awesome. Also, the the the parrot videos, those are really cool too because those have incorporated smartphone applications and you can see through the camera. You can see. Yes, you can use it as you can use as a surveillance tool. Although it is it's whisperer quiet. I've used that I've used that phrase like eight times on tech stuff recently. But yeah, it's it's not like it's subtle.

It's you'll hear a when you're playing with one of these things, but you can use it to look through the camera. And they've even incorporated games into the drones so that you can if you have one and your friend has one, you're both controlling them with your smartphones. You can play a game where you're essentially kind of like laser tag but with drones. How awesome is that? And then they also have other games where, uh, they'll have targets show up on your screen. They're not they

don't actually exist in real life. It's an augmented reality program where the targets appear on your screen and your job is to fly your drone so that you can use a little imaginary laser to shoot down these targets. It's neat stuff like that, and it really, I mean, beyond the fact that a quadricopter is pretty darn cool by itself. Yeah yeah, yeah. As a matter of fact, that one in particular also has some bumpers that it's sort of be a shield for the for the rotors. Yes, yes,

so that you can fly it indoors. A lot of uh model helicopters I've seen are are more traditional and do not have that kind of protection for the rotors. So you you wouldn't want to necessarily fly it around your house even you want to bang into a lamp or something. Yeah, even I've seen some of the small ones that are pumped sort of palm sized. Um. But yeah, I mean if if it actually touches something, it could uh damage it or the copter or both, and that

that would be you could bang into someone serious. So but yeah, the a r drone when the little bumpers you're talking about, they look like little disks that fit around like hollow disks. So yeah, they fit right around where the rotors are. And so it kind of makes us a safer device, so that if it were to bump into something, you would just get bumped, you wouldn't get cut. Yeah. Still you wouldn't want to get it around people or or pets certainly. Um. So yeah, but

it makes it a little safer. Yeah, it's kind of neat. And then uh, I've also heard from enthusiasts people who really enjoy flying r C helicopters and r C quadricopters that if you're interested in this, a quadricopter in general tends to be a lot easier to fly because those microprocessors I was talking about do a lot of the

fine tuning for you. So all you do is you tell it I want you to go up, and it takes care of the controls that needs to to make those different rotors spin at the right speeds and makes it go up or turn left or turn right or straight or whatever. So it's it can be a lot of fun and it can get people into the hobby and it's not incredibly challenging. On the other hand, flying

a remote control helicopter requires a lot of finesse. Not quite the same sort of thing you would need if you were flying a life size helicopter, but still it does require that you control things like the tail rotor and that you're very methodical with the way that you try and turn the helicopter, maneuver it, take off and landings. It's it's actually, from why I understand one of the more challenge ng RC vehicles to control, because there's just

so much you have to keep in mind. However, that being said, even though it's really challenging, I also hear it's one of the most enjoyable experiences, very rewarding because once you master that, you know, you really have a sense of accomplishment. So if you are interested in that kind of hobby, I recommend you go ahead and you know, check it out. See what, see what it would look. How much it would cost to get into it, because

these these devices can be fairly expensive. Sometimes sometimes the few hundred dollars is on the low end of some of these devices. But it is something that if you're interested in learning more about flight, if you're interested in just kind of getting a new skill, it's kind of a cool thing to get into. And uh, you know, you know what, I've never actually written in a helicopter, have you No, that's one of my goals I really want to do. I want to do a hellic just

a simple helicopter tour. Nothing, nothing terribly you know, exciting. I was thinking about actually doing one in Hawaii e because I thought, well, heck, that would be amazing, you know, the landscape and everything. But I happened to be married to someone who finds air travel to be the uh not the most relaxing experience, and so I didn't do that. I did go parasailing though. Interesting. Yeah, totally not at all like flying in a helicopter, I would imagine. Yeah,

I don't even know why I brought it up. All right, So let's let's wrap this up. Guys. This was fun. I'm glad we did this because, you know, we like to try and tackle lots of different kinds of topics here at tech Stuff. We like to talk about the things that are a big social phenomena, you know, things like like social networking sites and how technology affects us personally or as a society. And we like to talk

about companies, and we like to talk about innovators. But once in a while it's fun to take a specific type of technology and really deconstructed and talk about the various parts and what makes it go tick or fly in this case. I hope you guys enjoyed that class episode. If you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, maybe there's someone you

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