Category Archives: Flying

Stories about flying — for pleasure or for hire — and the things I’ve learned.

Helicopter Fuel Run / Camera Test

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Another video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

When I brought Wyrking Byrd to its summer home last week, I was too darn tired to make a fuel run before landing. With rain in the forecast and cherry season just a day away, I figured I’d better top it off, check out my camera setup — including a new camera mount — and try a new iPad mount. This is the footage I captured during this flight. It may come as no surprised to some of you that the audio camera didn’t capture intercom/cockpit audio so I wound up recording a narration track in the editing process. I hope you enjoy this!

Helicopter Cockpit POV Flight: Return from Cherry Drying

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Another video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

After another deep dive into my raw footage archives, I found this short video I shot after fueling at the airport. It has in-cockpit narration, but there’s no helicopter sound because it was shot with just one camera. I left the airport but instead of flying straight back to base, I made a detour to overfly a friend’s house, so it’s a bit longer than the normal 3-4 minute flight.

Hiller Flight with Cockpit POV

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Another video from the FlyingMAir YouTube channel.

A while back, I published a video I shot with my iPhone from the inside of a Hiller flown by my friend Mike. Here’s the GoPro footage for part of that flight. Mike is at the controls in the single, centered front seat. I’m sitting in back on the left side, just taking in the view and shooting video with my phone. Sometimes it’s nice to be a passenger.

In this video, we lift off from Mike’s home at a residential airpark in Arizona and head north and west, eventually starting to circle South Mountain. True to form, one of my GoPros died, so the video ends quite unexpectedly, right after Mike makes a profound observation.

The video has angled black borders because I set up the camera on an angle and everything was slanted. Rather than drive you nuts with a crooked view, I adjusted the video to level the horizon. I didn’t crop the image because I wanted to keep the full view of the instrument panel and as much of the area in front of us as I could.

Many thanks again to Mike for taking me on this ride.