got a minute so here's a few I've done over Christmas.
To a U.S. Army requirement for a bigger heavy-lift helicopter Boeing came up with a bigger & higher-powered Chinook. This aircraft quickly evolved into the 4-engined Super-Chinook version using 99.9% of standard components. There was also a Marine requirement for a sky-crane version to air-lift vehicles from ship to shore & so the Boeing Pegasus was created from the Super-Chinook.
A civilian version of the Pegasus was soon in demand & had a long life with many large & small companies, later ones being converted from ex-military aircraft by the SkyLifter company based at the Davis Monthan boneyards. Even the Birdseye company made use of it flying processing / freezer pods to outlying farms to process their harvest on the spot then collecting them a few days later for transfer direct to the local supermarket …
After the original Chinook production ended, Kaman bought up retired airframes to cannibalise for building a small helicopter for the business market. As its inaugural flight was scheduled for January 1st, 2000, the prototype Kaman GyroEgg was given the registration number N0001. One of the ground crew had a wicked sense of humour & put a dab of yellow paint on the lower portion of the 1 in the registration number, being (quite rightly) disgusted at the design of this “aircraft”.
On January 1st the GyroEgg took off, rising quickly to 500 feet where a nasty grinding noise was heard – the upper gearbox had failed bringing the top rotor to a sudden standstill. The Egg started to spin like its namesake, whereupon the pilot cut the engines to descend in auto-rotation. There was no expectation from the pilot that the landing would be anything good & he hung on with grim thoughts …
Indeed, the crash-landing was more of the former than the latter & even Humpty-Dumpty had a better chance of being put back together than the first, & only, GyroEgg – happily the pilot survived with only minor injuries.