Ok I'm not actually buying a helicopter at this time, but the discussion came up in the hangar last night.
With a nice cub going for over a hundred large anymore it seems you could do a lot of piston helicopter shopping for a similar price, or less.

Now I realize the operational cost would be much higher but it will also do things a cub won't do, not to mention be a lot of fun.
Here's the list so far
Bell 47; I'm told has an excellent mast assembly and "lifetime" blades but most seem to have Franklin engines, the j2 has a lycoming but is single pilot so might be tricky to talk someone into teaching you to fly it.

Hiller UH12; same Franklin engine problem as the 47, in the early models, but the D andE models have lycomings and much better performance. They are bragged up as the safest piston helicopter but I'm not sure why, incidentally Robinson makes the same claim.

Schweitzer 269 and 300; I know little about but I think they have three blade rotors so would be a hangar hog, they seem like the most economical of the small hellis but don't have much useful load.

What else enstrom or Robinson? There must be others someone on here must have some first hand experience?

Didn't see till I read it a second time that you specified "piston". I was going to suggest the Bell Augusta BA609. It would also be difficult to find an instructor for.

Brett

Did anyone favor an Engstrom. I haven't flown in one but have watched a guy doing work for the Fosest Service fertilizing trees and also hearding wild horses. Maybe it was just him but that thing was amazing in what it could do.

tcj wrote:Did anyone favor an Engstrom. I haven't flown in one but have watched a guy doing work for the Fosest Service fertilizing trees and also hearding wild horses. Maybe it was just him but that thing was amazing in what it could do.

The Enstrom is a great bird!! They gotta be easy to fly because I learned to fly mine?
Just for the unwary, the Maint. on a egg beater is way! Way! WAY! more than any SC alive!!
I know it is also more than any twin I ever had!!
IMHO

Been in a few R44s and it would be high on my list if buying a chopper. Never been in an R22, but I imagine they are similar, although I've heard they aren't as good in crosswinds. Makes sense since they are lighter.

Screw piston, go turbine! Hughes 500-C will work good for the fun you want to have.

Gump

I have been over at Soloy getting some avionics work done....now they have a turbine conversion for those piston choppers, and can improve the C206 climb rate, too.

Any discussion of helicopter ownership reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. There is a wealthy old-time rancher in Wyoming who owns a helicopter and uses it for predator control. A buddy of mine asked him about the economics of helicopter ownership one time. His response:

"Son, in order to own one of these things, a guy's gotta have one hell of a tax problem..."

That was all I ever needed to learn about buying a chopper!

If you really want a piston hell with grunt, the Hiller 12E is a fantastic bird, and very safe. There is a kind of a yardstick in the helo world, if you work in the city, get a Hughes, if you work 50 miles from town, get a Bell and if your in the middle of nowhere, get a Hiller. They don't break. I have a friend who had to put one down after his engine failed on a hillside, with his family onboard. It was a steep slope and it rolled. Nobody was even scratched. Turned out the rebuild on the engine was just a paint job and the fuel pump corroded through. The DAR that signed the certificate on that one was dead for two years when he signed. He got an Enstrom with the insurance money, but only flew it a bit and has been trying to sell it for 3 years.

Personally, I hated the Jet Ranger even the new ones I flew, I mean brand new full stab IFR ones, regular pig. Hughes are fun to fly and need someone with a wrench nearby, very fast, you pick your autorotation point directly between your feet when the engine fails, don't glide well. Don't even get me started on R22's, scare the living shit out of me. If you really had some money and wanted a bird that can perform and handles nicely and can still fit nicely on a trailer, get a Soloy 47. However, unless you build one on your own with Soloy, you have to pry the bill of sale out of the former owners dead rigored hands. Spray operators like the old wooden blades, hit something and they disappear in a cloud of toothpicks. The metal blades tend to wrap around the bubble and play veg-o-matic with the contents.

Helicopters are a wealthy playground. They need several orders of magnitude more maintenance and parts die on a calendar basis, not just hours. They are slow, so being able to put them on a trailer is a big savings, both in gas and hourlies.

I have owned two Soloys, a 206 and a 207. Both where beyond cool. Porter like performance, 600' take off loaded, climb to 10K in 4 minutes, cruise at redline. However, the maintenance reserves are nearly the same as a helicopter. You have all the Allison expenses and the Soloy components, which are lifed at 2,000 hrs, it really adds up. I worked as a consultant to Soloy in the 90's flew the Pathfinder twin engine Caravan they did. Great group. It is really nice they went and refined the 206 after Joe died. He didn't want to fix the annoying things about the conversion, like not getting a gross weight increase (the 207 had one, 206 didn't). It had its issues with bush operations. I used my 207 in Southern Sudan to go in before the Buffalo DHC-5. It ran a 93" three bladed propeller which had limited ground clearance. Eventually, one of my pilots, Tom Cruise (really was his name, but he was a Spaniard, pronounced it Cruith) hit the prop on landing in Southern Somalia and we had to disassemble the airplane and put it on an SAT Herc in 4 hours or forget it. It was eventually fixed, I sold it to a skydiving operation in California and they crashed it on the ferry flight, flew into icing (check cleared first). The 207 was really a half Caravan in load and operating cost, but severely ugly, we called it the 'fruit bat.'

The 206 was cool, but too expensive a toy for transporting my wide load around, so I sold it after 2 years to an utter fool in California. According to him he had 800 hours. He flew with me on the ferry to deliver, my at the time 12 year old son could fly better and had more common sense. The insurers said he had to get checked out at Soloy, took the poor pilot there 55 hours to sign him off, then he went to Kenmore and had floats put on, another 75 hours to get checked out there. So the term 'Fool,' barely describes it.

For a private guy, get an R22. High time but low calendar, 'cause you'll never fly off the time before the calendar overhaul as a private guy. Low maintenance (for a helicopter), reasonable performance, no surprises on costs.

You want to know the relative cost to own and operate all the other suggestions? Check out the rental rates.

Next up if you have the bucks would be a used Jetranger, but it's a big step up.

I like Robinson because they are right down the street from my house in Palos Verdes. The parts, training, and flight instruction are decent ( not perfect ). When I learned in a R22, didn't known how hard/scary it is to fly, because that's all we could afford and did not care.

Robison's market selling to the "upper middle" and "lower upper class" clients can be funky. But, they are making money which is good for all. 70% in 2012 went to foreign customers.

Need to raise my income 15k/month to afford a new helicopter to TBO. Not yet, but trying hard.

I flew 2,000 hours in Army helicopters and 0 in civilian. First, I couldn't afford one. Second, they are very dangerous unless Uncle Sugar is paying the bill for the time life parts. Everything from the sprag clutch (between engine and transmission) to the Jesus Nut on top of the head will kill you if it fails. That is why they are changed out when a crop duster would call them almost new.

I avoided spray jobs in helicopters because they were competing with airplanes that did the same work at one tenth the operating cost. Either they had a monopoly (some cities don't allow airplane spraying but allow helicopter spraying) or were cheating of time life.

Articulated rotor blades allow much better aggressive maneuvering. Mast bumping is a once in a lifetime event. I flew the TH-55 (Matel Messerschmitt) or Hughes 269 in flight school. It had a 12 V belt transmission, which eliminated one of the parts that would kill you every time it failed. I flew the OH-6A or Hughes 500 and the two bladed Cobra in Vietnam. The Hughes was more maneuverable and made the best Light Observation Helicopter (Loch) ever.

Any helicopter is a fine machine if you have a mission that requires it and the profits to support it.

I had to google the BA609 haha you and gump seem to have missed the same price as a cub requirement.

I'm thinking the hiller would be the way to go, anyone know what the actual cost would be to operate for a guy who puts on 50 or 60hrs a year and keeps it inside? Is there something expensive that calendars out?

ccurrie wrote: haha you and gump seem to have missed the same price as a cub requirement.

Hell, it's your money, not mine. Go get more!!!!!

Gump

Dogpilot had the best actual summary of the facts. Read it again.
And remember how fast 1.3 seconds goes by. When a Robinson engine quits... that is how long you have to drop the collective. If you are busy picking your nose, you are gone.
They sell the most, but they scare the crap out of me too.

I own an Enstrom 280C, love it, love it, love it.....about the same price as a nice 180 super cub, turbocharged with awesome performance....landed mine at 11000 feet at Pops fly-in....cruise at 100 mph all day long..... The next best thing to owning a magic carpet!!!! If you don't know about enstroms, do a little research.... They're awesome!

How many flying machines do you have joecub?

ccurrie wrote:How many flying machines do you have joecub?

Yeah..... Must be nice to be super rich

joecub wrote:I own an Enstrom 280C, love it, love it, love it.....about the same price as a nice 180 super cub, turbocharged with awesome performance....landed mine at 11000 feet at Pops fly-in....cruise at 100 mph all day long..... The next best thing to owning a magic carpet!!!! If you don't know about enstroms, do a little research.... They're awesome!

Stable, very very maneuverable
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6eX5L-cDgY
and possess' the best possible qualities in autorotation, huge inertia.

I believe that no Enstrom has ever had a critical in flight failure of the rotor system
I may be wrong on this, but I don't think so.

Pilot destroyed Enstrom here on Molokai. Pilot got caught in his own dust ball and lost it. Definitely pilot error. Sad use of a good helicopter. The pilot was a "know it all".

http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20001212X19036&key=1

Enstrom: 441 records meet your search criteria

http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/index.aspx