BRENNAN HELICOPTER.

Taranaki Daily News, 8 April 1922, Page 10

BRENNAN HELICOPTER.

PASSED REAL TESTS. CROSS COUNTRY FLIGHT PROJECT. London, Feb. 17. As one of the small party of Australasian journalists and overseas representatives who made the first trip on a Brennan monorail, in England over a dozen years ago somewhere on the coast of Kent, T note with keen interest the news of Mr. Brennan’s new success. The model vehicle was like a truck without sides, but the wheels underneath were set tandem-wise along the long axis of the platform-like truck. The feeling of astonishment is still with me at the way we al) were as if magnetised to that platform while the truck was in motion; although we were crowded up and 1 was one of those standing near the outside edge, we simply couldn’t fall off while the vehicle was in motion. It was an eye-opener in the first principles of the dynamics of rotation. We have travelled a good way since. This week we hear that Mr. Louis Brennan, formerly of Melbourne, and the inventor of the Brennan torpedo and the monorail, has invented the first really practical helicopter, an aeroplane capable of rising vertically from the ground. Tn order to test the engines, a vertical flight was attempted dt the South Farnborough experimental air station, and the machine rose and flew over the aerodrome and returned to its original taking-off point without any discernible jarring. Mr. Brennan intends to make a more comprehensive flight across country at an early date.