Photo by Nalini Raghavan
Steve Rastanis and his bright red AutoGyro MTOsport are waiting for the day that the gyrocopter takes its place among the widely accepted modes of air travel.
There are certain ideas or technologies that history passes over, things that get ignored despite their merits—Esperanto, Bitcoin, the traffic roundabout. Sometimes history dusts these concepts off and folds them into the broader culture. Sometimes, these good ideas are done well in one place and not another—socialized medicine, for example. Sometimes, the acolytes of these ideas get their chance at the big stage. Steve Rastanis and his bright red AutoGyro MTOsport are waiting for the day that the gyrocopter takes its place among the widely accepted modes of air travel. Steve Rastanis might not have to wait much longer.
A gyrocopter, to a writer who knows nothing of aerospace engineering, seems a bit like a plane, more like a helicopter, and something like a sailboat. Gyrocopters offer some of the advantages of a light, fixed-wing aircraft; like a small prop-plane, the gyrocopter is light and mechanically simple when compared to a jet or helicopter. They are roughly one-tenth the cost of a helicopter to fly, they use gasoline from the corner station, and, because the top rotor provides lift like a plane’s wing but not the power (like a helicopter), they are safe and require less room to take off or land than fixed-wing aircraft. A gyrocopter also offers a heck of a 360-degree view from its small, swaying fuselage as it meanders above the piney hills of East Feliciana Parish.
AutoGyro of Louisiana operates at the Feliciana Airpark Airport, a facility just south of Jackson, Louisiana, with a single landing strip. Photo by Frank McMains.
The low purchase price and affordable operating costs make the gyrocopter a realistic option for emergency services, police forces, ranchers, or natural resource managers. A doctor with a gyrocopter could bring medicine or offer life-saving transport to people in remote places. A park ranger overseeing a vast tract of land could affordably spot fires, or, in the furtherance of science, make observations about the behavior of some species of beguiling elk. Basically, anyone who has to cover lots of ground but doesn’t have the funds for conventional air transport is a potential user of the rapidly expanding family of gyrocopters. And Steve Rastanis can show them just how to do it.
In addition to being the only certified and FAA-approved gyrocopter instructor in Louisiana, Steve is also a distributor for AutoGyro GmbH of Hildesheim, Germany (that’s in Lower Saxony, don’t you know). At the Feliciana Airpark Airport in Jackson, Louisiana, which consists of a single landing strip, he can put you in a brand new personal aircraft for around the price of a luxury SUV. All the parts will be shipped to Jackson and assembled on site. And, if you want to learn to fly one, then Steve is most certainly your guy. An introductory flight, like the one I took, is the first step in the FAA-certified pilot training Steve provides, a rarity in the United States.
Out at the Feliciana airport, now outfitted with a recently built Aviation Business Development Complex, Steve and the grandees of East Feliciana Parish are making plans to leverage the modest infrastructure for economic growth. The long neglected airport, which sits next to Dixon Correctional Institute, was under the purview of the state Department of Transportation and Development, trafficked only by hazardous swarms of buzzards that gathered around DCI’s nearby compost site (since relocated) until the airport passed into parish hands in 2014. DCI is a medium security prison, ringed by inmate-tended fields of mustard greens and palisades of concertina wire. Bloodhounds bay from the extensive kennels nearby where the Louisiana Department of Corrections trains tracking and K-9 dogs. The location doesn’t yet have the feel of an economic development zone, but Steve is the airport’s first tenant, and his enthusiasm for gyrocopters is its own sort of decoration.
The thing about fringe technology is that it is at the fringe. No matter how efficient or safe or needed a new idea may be, it still has to overcome the perception that it is kind of weird. The fact that he advocates flying around in fringe technology might make Steve seem a little crazy, but most things we are unfamiliar with seem a little crazy at first. Once we become familiar with novel contraptions like the gyrocopter, then we generally realize that the problem isn’t with the new thing, the problem is with how we were looking at it. People like Steve, people who see potential where others see danger, deserve a lot of credit for their tenacity and vision. While the world was busy wondering when they would get their flying car, Autogyro GmbH was building something that was a fair approximation of our Jetson-fueled dreams for the future.
The candy-apple red gyrocopter uses a fraction of the Jackson strip to take off. With far less commotion or shaking of airframes than a helicopter or small airplane produces, Steve feeds power to the rear-facing push-prop that gives the gyrocopter thrust. The rotor overhead reaches two hundred rpm, the minimum required to provide lift, and the gyrocopter wags its insouciant tail at the Earth and heads skyward.
The red clay hills are stippled with leafless trees, except for occasional stands of loblolly pine and pink dogwoods coming into bloom. Looking down from the snug passenger compartments of the gyrocopter, Thompson Creek is a snarl of mud-brown water and fine white river sand mounded up at the turns. The East Louisiana State Hospital, where Buddy Bolden blew his last note, is one of the few clusters of buildings visible through the cold air. Steve demonstrates how the gyrocopter gains speed by sacrificing altitude.
He brings the craft to a stop, mid-air. In a helicopter this would be called a hover, but because of the peculiar design of the gyrocopter, it is more of an arrested fall. For a second you feel weightless and it becomes quieter, like the extended moment on the outside turn of a roller coaster.
We can see the angular, center-truss bridge at False River, and the low western horizon fills with steam-generated clouds coming out of a nameless industrial facility. Through the headset attached to my helmet, I ask Steve what he likes most about flying his gyrocopter.
Gravity begins to assert its inescapable authority over all things that go up, and we bank to the east heading down toward the airstrip, losing altitude. We return to Earth, to the normal rules of gravity, to the spot past Dixon Correctional’s far field, as Steve answers the question: “It’s the freedom, that’s what I like.” It is all beautiful juxtaposition, here in this gyrocopter; I think I understand what he means.
AutoGyro of Louisiana
(225) 503-5168
autogyrooflouisiana.com
