Two Salt Lake men are building an autogyro - a heavier-than-air craft supported in the air by a rotor instead of by fixed wings - that they hope will revolutionize police aerial surveillance and become a popular mode of civilian and business travel.
Brothers Jay and David Groen, both Vietnam war veterans, authors and pilots, call their craft the Hawk Autogyro and are constructing one- and two-place models in a factory at 1784 W. 500 South.They have test-flown their autogyro and expect to have the first production models ready for sale next year.
Jay Groen said the autogyro was invented by a Spaniard, Juan del la Cierva, in 1919. "It is different from an airplane or a helicopter. A propeller in the nose or in the rear, as in our Hawk Autogyro, moves it through the air like an airplane, but it has no wing.
"Instead, it has a rotor, like a helicopter, but the rotor is driven by air pressure, not by an engine."
Groen said the Hawk Autogyro, which is Federal Aviation Agency certified, can take off vertically. While flying, the rotor is disconnected from the engine but the blades continue to revolve because of the air pressure against them.
He said the Hawk Autogyro is much easier to fly than a helicopter, can fly as fast as 160 mph and has a service ceiling of 16,000 feet. It cannot hover in the air like a helicopter, but it can descend almost straight down and land in a small place.
"It is much less expensive to build and maintain than a helicopter," David Groen said. "We figure a medium-size police department that spends $1 million per year to lease and operate a surveillance helicopter can do the job for $100,000 with a Hawk Autogyro."
The Hawk Autogyro has an empty weight of 800 pounds and a gross weight of 1,500 pounds. Day and night surveillance in the Hawk Augogyro is facilitated by not only superior pilot visibility, David Groen said, but by using an optional nose-mounted forward looking infrared camera. "A television monitor in the cockpit reveals people and objects below hidden from the naked eye."
With the exception of not being able to hover, he said, "the Hawk Autogyro will out-perform most modern helicopters in high speed and maneuverability and has the capability of sustaining very slow flight - 15 mph."
The Groen brothers are the authors of the best-selling novel, "Huey," a story about a helicopter assault pilot in Vietnam, based on the experiences of David Groen, who piloted a combat helicopter during the war, and his brother, who served as an Air Force intelligence linguist in Vietnam during the war.