Ignorance is Curable

I was wandering around on one of the news aggregation sites, as I am wont to do, when I found a posting about the newest Kaman helicopter design being offered for sale. As an unabashed aircraft wonk, I was glad to see one of the pioneering companies in aerospace getting back into the civilian market in a (potentially) big way, but I found the posting itself annoying – the user who posted it was mocking the intermeshed contra-rotating twin rotor design which makes the aircraft lighter, safer, and far more stable than more conventional helicopter designs, implying that there is something dangerous about a design in which the rotor blades pass over and under the same point. In a pre-Internet age this would just be displaying one’s ignorance, but today there’s really no excuse for this kind of brainless nonsense…

Anyone with a working Internet connection could have found out that Kaman Aircraft introduced its first intermeshed design 71 years ago, with the K-125 prototype, in a ten-second search. Only a few additional seconds would be required to find the Kaman HH-43 Huskie, a similar design built for the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps that was in service for over 20 years as a search-and-rescue platform. You’d have to care about helicopters and/or military history to notice that the Huskie flew more rescue missions during the Vietnam War than any other type of helicopter, while establishing an unequalled safety record, but even if you’re just looking at the new Kaman designs you should at least have noticed how effective these aircraft are, especially for the price…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that anyone who does not make a hobby of either unusual aircraft or military history (or preferably both) would or even should know about the Kaman intermeshed rotor types, let alone be able to explain the significant advantages provided by its drive system. Nor would I ever suggest that all new technologies should be embraced from the moment of their introduction, or imply that there have never been fatally flawed aircraft offered for sale. What I am pointing out here is that this isn’t just a mature technology; it’s more than seven decades old. Intermeshed rotor designs were in service twenty-two years before the packet-switching technology that makes the Internet possible was invented, and nearly thirty years before Jobs and Wozniak built the first personal computer…

I don’t expect that anyone who is in charge of acquiring new aircraft for any company that operates helicopters is going to get their purchase information from a random commenter on an Internet news aggregation site, any more than I expect random readers of this blog (assuming I have readers) to care about the history of esoteric helicopters. But making fun of any technology just because it is unfamiliar to you is asinine, and in a business context it’s another one of the ways in which people manage to destroy perfectly good companies just because they weren’t paying attention…

I strongly recommend that anyone who has a need for helicopters capable of transporting medium-sized external slung loads check out the new offerings from Kaman aircraft. And even more strongly that anyone who finds themselves confronted by what appears to be an exotic new technology take another few seconds and make sure that it wasn’t decades old before they were born before they make any decisions about it…