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Free
as the wind blows - free to follow my heart. Those words painted
on the tail of my gyro are the very essence of gyro flying.
I
have never felt such a sense of freedom as when flying my Bensen Gyrocopter. In
the gyro the urge to ‘ follow my heart ‘, to chase rainbows, to see
what’s over the next hill, or around the next bend, or to simply just play
on the wind was so very strong. No matter how long the time spent aloft, the flight
always ended too soon.
And the funny thing
is, when my husband wanted to build a gyro I was not very enthusiastic about it
to say the least.
At the time my world
revolved around airplanes. Oh yes, I thought airplanes were what flying was all
about. We had an Aeronca Champ and I was a licensed airplane pilot. We didn’t
need anything else to be happy — well, I didn’t anyway.
But
that was just me — my husband had other ideas. He thought airplane flying
was boring. Boring! Oh such sacrilege! Go wash your mouth out! He was determined
to build a Bensen Gyrocopter, or as our daughter Linda, called it,
‘
a wanna-be aircraft flying machine ‘.
To
say I resented the gyro is an understatement. We didn’t have a lot of money
for flying machines and I could imagine money being spent on his gyro project
instead of on my beloved Champ. It didn’t bother me at all to pay $25 per
spark plug for the Champ — after all, it only had 8 spark plugs total. But
to pay $200 for a few lengths of aluminum tubing and hardware for the gyro ruffled
my fur a bit and there were many $ 200 and $ 300 packages of gyro parts delivered
to our door.
But my husband prevailed.
He built his Bensen gyro and then he made a big mistake - he let me fly it.
Well, friends, as the saying goes, the rest
is history. I was utterly captivated by the gyro and ended up spending the next
forty years flying gyros.
I’m a retired
gyroplane CFI and a widow now with a lifetime of wonderful memories of gyro flying.
My new book, Born Free — My Life In Gyrocopters, is the story of those wonderful
gyro flying years.
Marion Springer
, CFI - Gyroplane Ret.
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