I have attached picture that my son took at the Peachtree City air show this past week end.

In one of my earlier stories, “Hanscom Field”, I think, I mentioned meeting Lynn Bolinger and the MIT professor that designed the Helio Courier, well I think they were brilliant because it is a fantastic airplane. They achieved the highest stall speed to cruise speed ratio ever for utility aircraft and it has only been exceeded by Mach two plus aircraft that can land on a carrier deck.

I flew it every chance I got and tried my best to become a really good Courier pilot. It was easy to fly as long as you had power. Landings with power were pretty simple, just get it in the landing configuration and get it near the ground and decrease the power till you touched down, usually way below 40 MPH, yes cross winds were a problem, but if the crosswind was strong you just turned into the wind before touch down and landed across the runway. It did not require much, you could take off or land across most modern runways, Bangkok had a north/south and an east/west runway, as did Vientiane, Laos, where we went fairly frequently. Both towers would usually instruct us non air liner types to the non active runway so the practice of landing across the runway became pretty normal.

The Courier being a single engine aircraft and me being skeptical of all things mechanical, they just may not do what they are supposed to do. I started experimenting with what I would do if I had an engine failure. Wow, with flaps extended and spoilers out the glide approached 20 degrees nose down and the three point landing attitude was about 15 degrees nose up, that is 30+ degrees of angular change during round out for a power off landing, doing it with the minuscule amount of excess energy and it all happening in a few short seconds really became a challenge. Yeah, I survived and so did the airplane. The other pilots that flew the Courier had a lot more trust in the engine than I did and they thought I was silly practicing such things, one told me that since the Courier stalls at such a slow speed, if the engine quits just glide at minimum speed and let it hit. ” at that speed you will probably not get hurt too badly”. He was probably right but I had a mind set of “it could happen, so be prepared”.

It turned out that if you did not use full flaps and glided power off at the speed that would just barely keep the slats closed, the glide angle was not so steep and there was a bit more energy to use in the round out and touch down, I felt a little more in control, of course the slats
deployed with a bang and the airplane quit flying very quickly so during round out if you were not very near the earth, you know the routine 32ft per second squared down, so the nearer the earth the less jarring the landing. I only managed a few really smooth power off landings in the
Courier. Google has so much info on the Courier I will defer to the many expert sources there for the attributes.

Did the Courier have any faults? Absolutely, it was a high maintenance airplane, it had flaps, slats, spoilers, and ailerons on the wings, now add the control system for each of them and the complexity and cost of manufacture and maintenance goes up. A Courier cost about as much as a DeHaveland Beaver, most of them had a geared Lycoming 295 HP engines which made metal in the screens twice during the six months that I flew it regularly. So it was a high maintenance engine, that ran up the cost of ownership, so only governments and organizations where some one else is paying the bills could afford to operate them. I did ride in/fly an early Courier that had a direct drive engine, a two bladed prop, and an augmenter tube exaust system, where the engine cooling air was pumped out of the engine compartment by the jet pump action of the augmenter tube. It was a smoother and quieter airplane to fly but the augmenter tube required repacking with fibre glass at regular
intervals, so even though it was some what simpler it was still a maintenance hog.

So the Courier never became a popular family or corporate plane, it remains a speciality item… Bob