A team of student engineers from the University of Maryland are attempting to keep their pedal-powered helicopter, Gamera II, off the ground for at least 60 seconds  — which would set a new world record.

Watch live streaming of the trials on Friday morning, or follow their progress on Twitter.

Here’s video of a (40-second) flight earlier this week.

Who do you want to see hovering overhead after you crash? That's right, an Apache AH Mk1. Photograph courtesy AgustaWestland.

Captain Charlotte Madison (a pseudonym) was the first female Apache pilot in the British Army Air Corps. She completed two tours in Afghanistan, which she details in her 2010 book Dressed to Kill. In the excerpt below, Madison and her copilot, stationed in Kandahar, await clearance to perform an air test.

As we sit waiting for clearance on to the runway, ATC [Air Traffic Control] is busy and I can’t get a word in edgeways. I drum my fingers on the cockpit dashboard and Darwin whistles tunelessly. Seconds tick by, and the radios buzz with voices.

“Mayday Mayday Mayday, this is Death 23 Death 23 Death 23.”

An American man’s voice booms over the radio, and the first three words make everyone listening freeze.

Mayday is a call only made when the aircraft or the crew is in immediate peril, and everything stops to ensure the safety of the stricken crew. To have a Mayday emergency in a hostile environment is a crew’s worst nightmare.

“Shit,” we say together, reaching in tandem for our radio volume dials so that we can hear every word. I can practically feel every aircraft within a ten-mile radius listening in.

“Death 23, this is Kandahar Air Traffic, your Mayday call is acknowledged. Send your position and type of emergency,” the calm voice of the girl in ATC replies immediately.

Darwin and I hold our breath for the details. My heart beats against my harness straps, imagining if I was one of the crew inside Death.

“Roger, stand by.” Death’s voice is clear and slow—he doesn’t sound as stressed as I’d be.

“He sounds chilled out, doesn’t he?” Darwin notices.

“Well, it’s all recorded, isn’t it? You don’t want to sound like a Wiener when they listen to the tape at the Board of Inquiry, do you?” I stick up for Death. We used to sit around on bad-weather days on the pilots course bragging about the radio call we’d make if we were ever speeding towards the ground in a flameball. There was a famous tale of a fast-jet pilot who’d fatally crashed into a cliff, and just before impact he radioed his base with: “Better cancel the hot lunches.” It was legend with all baby-pilots.

“What kind of aircraft is Death anyway?” I ask Darwin.

“Beats me.” He’s distracted, waiting for details.

“Kandahar traffic, this is Death 23. We have suffered an engine failure after take-off. We are currently 500 yards east of the 27 threshold. We are on the ground, repeat: on the ground.”

“Roger,” ATC responds. “Can you confirm that you are still inside the wire?” If the aircraft is inside the safety of the barbed-wire fence around the Kandahar base, then it’s not as bad as it sounds, I think. If not, it’s the worst news imaginable.

“Death is outside the wire,” the voice drawls back.

“Why the hell is he so relaxed about it then?” Darwin says loudly. “Shall we?”

“I know,” I say, as the idea comes simultaneously to me. “I’ll offer to go into overwatch.”

We are armed and scary-looking; we can hover over the scene of the accident as a deterrent until some ground troops can recover the wreck and the crew. It works overhead Kajaki, so there’s no reason we can’t prevent an enemy attack here too.

“Kandahar, this is Ugly Five Four,” I transmit.

“Stand by,” ATC cuts in.

She’s not happy with my interruption. She radios Death and urgently asks for his coordinates; he tells her to wait. He’s clearly in no rush, whereas she is now starting to sound worried.

“Kandahar, Ugly Five Four can lift immediately and cover the accident. We are armed.” I transmit this in one long sentence so she can’t cut me out.

“Roger,” she responds, then swiftly relays our offer to Death.

There is a pause, and then, unbelievably, he declines.

“That won’t be necessary,” he calmly tells ATC.

For some minutes, we repeat this exchange with increasing levels of urgency. Death is outside the wire, unprotected. At least the crew seem to be fine. I keep telling ATC that we can be overhead in less than a minute; she keeps suggesting it to Death, Death keeps refusing. My mouth is dry and my heart is beating so hard it’s as if something is kicking me from inside. Sweat starts to form in beads on my back and shoulders but I feel strangely cold.

ATC is getting into the swing of things now and asks Death whether they have any injuries on board.

“Negative. No pilots or crew onboard,” Death replies.

“Ha! No wonder he crashed, with no pilot,” shouts Darwin.

I’m confused. What the…?

ATC is confused too.

“Confirm NO crew?” she repeats.

“Affirm, ma’am. Death is an unmanned aerial vehicle. I’m talking to you from my office.”

I can’t believe I wasted heartbeats on him. I look at Darwin in the mirror. He looks back, shaking his head. Nothing needs to be said, and I can hear him chuckling into his microphone.

Thanks to reader Mark Mallari for directing us to this book.

Painting of Titanic sinking from the Liverpool Daily Post & Echo.

Admit it: You thought text messaging began with the advent of mobile phones. Not so, claims maritime historian John Maxtone-Graham in his new book, Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner. Maxtone-Graham writes:

Years before cell phones, Marconi men [shipboard telegraphers] were the first texters: OM or OB (old man or old boy) was a commonly transmitted preliminary…. They employed a host of other time-saving shortcuts. STBI meant standby, GE and GN, respectively, “good evening” and “good night.” Some abbreviations were culled from other languages: C signaled “yes.” DE, doubtless pinched from the French, meant “from.” N was “no,” “you” became U, and R was “are.” The word “message” was shortened to MSG, “traffic” to TFC. “Best regards” was conveyed enigmatically by the number 73, akin to later CB enthusiasts’ 10-4. Later, when female operators were recruited, “love and kisses” was signified by 88. Disparagements had their own coded pejorative: LID branded an inept telegrapher as a “poor operator,” QRL meant “keep quiet, I’m busy,” and GTH a pithier “go to hell.” The abrupt torrent GTHOMQRL said it all: “Go to hell, old man, I’m busy.” A gentler sign-off might be TUOMGN: “Thank you, old man, good night.”

The AH-64 Apache Longbow attack helicopter. Courtesy Boeing.

And what has this got to do with aviation? Modern military pilots text one another, even in the middle of battle. As Ed Macy explains in Apache, crews use a secure text messaging system consisting of four lines of text and 176 character spaces. Macy and his fellow Apache pilots would often text one another in order to minimize the chatter on the Apache helicopter network, giving updates, for instance, on their remaining weaponry. A pilot might send the message: 40*30MM, 0*HEISAP, 8*FLECH, 0*HELLF. (Translation: The Apache was down to 40 30-millimeter cannon rounds, was out of High Explosive Incendiary Semi-Armour Piercing rockets, had 8 remaining Flechette rockets, and no more Hellfire laser-guided missiles.)

What’s next? NakedSecurity reported in February that the U.S. military is in line to get Smartphones cleared for secret dispatches. “The United States,” reports Lisa Vaas, “which currently forbids government workers or soldiers to use smartphones to send classified messages, is preparing a modified version of Google’s Android operating system that will meet its security certifications…. While pinpointing fellow infantrymen would be a boon, the military has to ensure that soldiers aren’t simultaneously broadcasting their own GPS coordinates to enemy combatants. Weather apps, for example, automatically transmit a phone’s GPS coordinates in order to deliver a local forecast.”

Igor Sikorsky hovering in his VS-300 (NASM Photo SI-82-3591~A)

AND the company will pay you for the privilege, with a year’s worth of shop space, resources, mentorship and development aid in the Sikorsky Innovation Center in Stamford, Connecticut. All you have to do is submit a winning proposal, by March 30, on an innovation related to vertical-flight technology. Says Marianne Heffernan, Sikorsky Aircraft communications manager, proposals could easily come from people “who don’t even realize they have a technology…relevant to the rotorcraft arena.”

Details are here.

And fine-print stuff is here.

As the most technically advanced helicopter in the world, the Apache AH Mk1 was also the hardest to fly…. To train each Apache pilot from scratch cost £3 million (each custom-made helmet alone had a price tag of £22,915). It took six months just to learn how to fly the machine, another six to know how to fight in it, and a final six to be passed combat ready. And that was if you were already a fully qualified, combat-trained army helicopter pilot. If you weren’t, you’d have to add four months for ground school and learning to fly fixed wing at RAF Barkston Heath, six months learning to fly helicopters at RAF Shawbury, half a year at the School of Army Aviation learning to fly tactically, and a final sixteen-week course in Survival, Evasion and Resistance to Interrogation, courtesy of the Intelligence Corps’ most vigorous training staff. Three years in total….

Flying an Apache almost always meant both hands and feet doing four different things at once. Even our eyes had to learn how to work independently of each other. A monocle sat permanently over our right iris. A dozen different instrument readings from around the cockpit were projected into it. At the flick of a button, a range of other images could also be superimposed underneath the green glow of the instrument symbology, replicating the TADS’ [target acquisition and designation sights] or PNVS’ [pilots night vision sight] camera images and the Longbow Radars’ targets.

The monocle left the pilot’s left eye free to look outside the cockpit, saving him the few seconds that it took to look down at the instruments and then up again…. New pilots suffered terrible headaches as the left and right eye competed for dominance. They started within minutes, long before take-off…. As the eyes adjusted over the following weeks and months the headaches took longer to set in. It was a year before mine disappeared altogether…. I once filmed my face during a sortie with a video camera as an experiment. My eyes whirled independently of each other throughout, like a man possessed.

An Apache helicopter pilot with the U.K. Army Air Corps in Afghanistan, May 2009. Photo: Cpl Rupert Frere RLC, UK Ministry of Defence.

Eurocopter's X3 (Photo: Patrick Penna)

Helicopter speeds have traditionally been limited by a phenomenon called “retreating blade stall,” which describes what happens to the main rotor at high speed. The relative wind on the retreating blade is reduced by the forward speed of the helicopter to a point where it no longer generates lift, and the helicopter rolls off to the side with reduced lift.

Tilt-rotor vehicles like the Bell Boeing Osprey turn the rotor blades into propellers. Now a less complex solution that dates back several decades is re-emerging: the compound helicopter, which uses a dedicated propulsor to produce forward speed. The Piasecki X-49A modified a Sikorsky UH-60 with a lifting surface made up of two wings, plus a ducted fan in the tail to push the aircraft to speeds of around 200 mph. The wings take up part of the lift load so the main rotor doesn’t have to provide as much at high speeds, and blade stall no longer matters as much.

The Eurocopter X3 is a modified EC155, itself a derivative of that company’s Dauphin (the U.S. Coast Guard operates one version). The X3 has achieved speed bursts as high as 267 mph, propelled by two tractor propellers driven by the main engines and mounted on stubby wings just beneath the main rotor. At high speed, the six-blade main rotor is slowed to reduce the drag of the advancing blade, while the wings provide necessary lift.

Sikorsky’s X-2 has advanced far enough to become the proof-of-concept for a prototype military aircraft  now designated the S-97 Raider, a high-speed attack and scout helicopter. The X-2 proved the efficacy of a coaxial main rotor blade in which both sides of the helicopter have advancing blades opposite retreating blades, providing a symmetrical lift that requires no wing. Forward thrust is provided by a pusher propeller in the tail, an arrangement that took the experimental craft to a top speed of 290 mph, and, in a descent, to 300 mph. There is no tail rotor à la the traditional helicopter, and the X-2 maneuvers about the yaw axis by applying differential torque to the two main rotors. The little X-2 (it weighed less than 8,000 pounds on takeoff) was retired after only 22 hours of flying.

The X-2 is not Sikorsky’s first compound helicopter. Its S-72 employed a fixed wing and two turbofan engines to achieve a design speed of up to 345 mph. The wing generated enough lift to allow the craft to fly without a main rotor, which it actually did during testing. The X-Wing, another 1980s experimental craft, employed large, rigid main rotor blades that were intended to be stopped inflight to form an X-shape wing that supplemented lift from a conventional wing. Two turbofans provided thrust.

The closest the U.S. military came to buying and operating a compound helicopter was when it launched the Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne with a contract in 1966 for 10 prototypes. Problems and delays during development led to cancellation of the Cheyenne, but the Army followed that with the AH-64 Apache, which is not a compound helicopter but is in operation today.

Here’s a demo of Eurocopter’s X-3 at last summer’s Paris Air Show:

The Army’s CH-47 Chinook helicopter has flown a stunning but standard maneuver—the aft-wheel pinnacle landing—since 1962. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the move has reached its peak.

This month as many as 5,000 pairs of boots will leave the ground, with a goal to extract 33,000 by next September. Many will exit the same way they were inserted, by the back door of a CH-47.

In the photo above, Australian special forces practiced for insertion into Iraq in 2003 using a CH-47D for Operation Falconer.

In Afghanistan (photo below, in Kandahar), where clear and flat land is even more the exception, there are few places to land a 52-foot fuselage. Add the Chinook’s rotors and its length stretches to 99 feet. The Army’s other workhorse, the UH-60 Blackhawk, can nose its way in. As for a CH-47, just give a pilot a patch big enough for its 12-foot width, plus a few feet for a ladder and a prayer, whether on a rooftop or a wind blasted summit.

A pinnacle landing is challenging even before you add enemy fire, darkness, or time pressure. Winds gather force as they sweep up the slope. At the same time the Chinook’s engine loses ability with high altitude and high temperature.

Pilots need to adjust the power level to sustain a hover by considering the current altimeter and pressure-altitude reading as well as the engine temperature, any of which may be unreliable whether it’s from a lack of field data for remote deployments or combat damage to the Chinook.

“Make room for error; don’t figure in a wind factor when determining the power required to hover,” says Randall Padfield in Learning to Fly Helicopters. “If no wind, you have the correct figure; if windy, which is very likely, the increased performance will be gravy. Don’t go in unless you have a huge power reserve and an extremely important reason for landing at the site.”

The Huey in action. Photograph by Lt. Col. S.F. Watson, U.S. Army, NASM collection.

In 1966, Second Lieutenant Larry Liss was on the Czech-German border during a snowstorm, freezing his varlata off, when he saw something beautiful. It was a Bell UH-1 helicopter, still on the ground. The pilot—who was wearing short sleeves and drinking a cup of coffee—took one look at Liss and shook his head. “He said, ‘You’re such a jerk’—he used other words; I’m trying to keep it clean—” recalls Liss more than 40 years later. “I said ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Look at you. You’re freezing your ass off, it’s snowing, look at me, I’m warm. You should sign up for helicopter training.’ ” So Liss did.

Four days later he was stateside. Because of a pilot shortage, the U.S. Army had created an accelerated training program: Four months primary instruction at Fort Wolters, followed by advance training at Fort Rucker. The first five hours were spent learning how to hover. “My whole class,” says Liss, “was able, after a couple of hours, to take the helicopter up to a hover. I was already in the ninth hour and still couldn’t hover. And you have to solo in 10 hours. So I’m beginning to panic.” Out of 84 pilots, Liss was ranked 82.

The 173rd Airborne Brigade. Photograph: U.S. Army, NASM collection

But this self-described “really bad pilot,” along with pilots Tom Baca and Jack Swickard, and engineer Al Croteau, went on to save more than 100 South Vietnamese troops ambushed by the North Vietnamese Army—using an unarmed VIP Huey. Their heroic story is the subject of the Smithsonian Channel film “Helicopter Missions: Vietnam Firefight.”

It was May 14, 1967, and Baca had just 12 days to go in-country when he and Liss get the call about a group of soldiers that needed rescuing. “We were the only helicopter there,” says Baca, “and they needed our help. We were not going to say no.” When they got to the coordinates, they realized there was no landing zone; tall bamboo covered the area where they were meant to set down. Baca and Liss decided that the lack of a landing zone wouldn’t slow them down: they decided to use the Huey’s rotor blades to slice through the bamboo canopy. “We were a lawnmower, basically,” recalls Baca. Fully aware that damage to the underside of the rotor blade could cripple their helicopter, the two carved out a landing zone and set down. They picked up six casualties and headed back to camp. On the 15-minute ride, they got another desperate message: The remaining men were pinned down by a battalion of 600 men, and the entire company needed rescuing. It took Baca and Liss, along with a second helicopter piloted by Swickard and engineer Al Croteau, 11 hours to evacuate the men. On their final run, the defense perimeter was under the rotor blades.

In the film, the men return to the scene of their amazing rescue four decades later.

“Helicopter Missions: Vietnam Firefight” is available on demand from the Smithsonian Channel. Check your local listings to learn more.

So what else would students at the University of Maryland—whose mascot is a terrapin—name their flying contraption, which yesterday appears to have become the first human-powered helicopter to fly. The flight didn’t last long, or get far off the ground. In fact, don’t blink (at about the 3:18 mark of this video) or you’ll miss it. But congratulations to the Maryland team, and to “pilot” Judy Wexler, whose furious four-limbed pedaling raised Gamera a few inches off the floor.

The team’s ultimate goal is winning the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize, which requires that they hover for 60 seconds, and reach a height of three meters. This worries me a little. How much faster can Judy pedal?

Having suffered technical problems and a hard landing, the helo apparently couldn’t fly back out of bin Laden’s compound, and became evidence to be destroyed by the SEALs as they left in the other helicopter(s). The obvious aim was to keep the stricken helo from falling into the hands of the Pakistanis, and thereby, their allies the Chinese. So the SEALs blew it up, probably with grenades.

In the fireball began a firestorm of speculation among flight buffs about what exactly the aircraft was.

The consensus is that the helo was a stealthed-out version of the H-60 Black Hawk, made by Sikorsky. The tail boom, which survived the explosion and fire relatively intact, didn’t look much like anything the rest of us have seen. Case in point: a “hubcap” over the tail rotor, presumably to muffle the noise and hide it from radar, and angular lines reminiscent of stealth airplanes. According to an anonymous, retired special operations aviator interviewed by the Army Times, “Certain parts of the fuselage, the nose and the tail had these various almost like snap-on parts to them that gave it the very unique appearance.” The rotor also appears to have more blades than a typical rotor, which could reduce noise levels or allow it to operate at a lower rpm, also reducing noise.

The helicopter tail section, clearly stealthified. Photo: Reuters/Stringer

While the technology might be new, the idea of a “black” helo isn’t. Here’s a story about one in Vietnam.

More interesting, maybe, is that cell phone service and electricity in the vicinity of the compound went down just before the SEALs arrived, and came back up after they left, indicating that either the choppers or an aircraft loitering above employed advanced electronic countermeasures to further pull the wool over bin Laden’s eyes. It’s well known that electronic warfare airplanes such as the EA-18G Growler can jam wireless signals. But it is major news that they can jam electricity running through wires on the ground, if indeed that is what was happening.

Along with the Stealth Hawks, the new jamming abilities appear to be one more spoonful of secret potion now spilled to the world. And ain’t we just lappin’ it up?’

Photo: Ed Darack

Air & Space contributor in the field Ed Darack, who spent time on the ground and in the air in Afghanistan in the V-22 Osprey and other rotorcraft (here’s his story on the Osprey in Afghanistan), knows a thing or two about helicopters. He emails from Ft. Collins, Colorado that the Black Hawk is one of the most conspicuous and mass produced helicopters in the history of military aviation, and “has a number of variants that the general public does know about, including those for special operations purposes, although these are seldom photographed.”

Darack sends a few images below that show a U.S. Air Force Special Operations MH-60G Pave Hawk. “The ‘M’ designates ‘modified,’ ” says Darack, “typically for special operations purposes. I was lucky to get these shots at the end of the expeditionary airstrip at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center near Bridgeport, California, preparing to photograph a Marine Corps CH-46 Sea Knight “Phrog,” when out of nowhere this Pave Hawk showed up during high altitude training to refuel.

Photo: Ed Darack

“The pilots didn’t seem to mind me photographing them and their aircraft,” he continues. “One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Pave Hawk is the refueling probe for extended duration flight. Was this model the progenitor to the ‘Stealth 60″ of the bin Laden raid? Maybe, but without a doubt, knowledge gleaned by pilots who fly these in training and actual combat went into crafting the mystery helicopter.”

Photo: Ed Darack

An Air Force Reserve Para-rescueman conducts 100-foot rappel training from an HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter. U.S. Air Force photograph by Bennie J. Davis III.

It’s summer 2005. In Afghanistan, a four-man U.S. Navy SEAL team has been ambushed by the Taliban. A Boeing CH-47 Chinook helicopter is immediately sent to extract them, but as it approaches the rescue site, the Taliban fire a rocket-propelled grenade, hitting the Chinook’s fuel tanks. All 16 crew members on board are killed. The Navy SEALs turn to the Air Force 920th Rescue Wing and their Pave Hawk helicopters for help.

So begins “The Taliban Gambit,” an installment in the Smithsonian Channel’s four-part series Helicopter Missions.

The men of the 920th Rescue Wing are remarkably candid. Initially, Special Ops and the Rescue Wing are skeptical about the others’ ability: “I think they [the SEALs] look down on us, question our training, our crews, our capability,” says pilot Lieutenant Colonel Jeff “Spanky” Peterson.

“[The SEALs are] a very proud community that doesn’t like to ask for help from outsiders. So the initial reception was—I was a little bit cold,” recalls Colonel Jeff “Skinny” Macrander, commander of the rescue wing.

But Macrander convinces the SEALs that his team can do the job. They search for two nights, a faint clicking on the emergency frequency suggesting that survivors are trying to make contact. When the rescue wing finally locates their man, they learn their landing zone is a tiny shelf hacked from the side of the mountain.

“In setting up for the landing,” says Peterson, “I thought ‘This is all going to work.’ And then it all went south in a hurry.”

Did the 920th Rescue Wing save the day? Tune in to the Smithsonian Channel on Demand to find out. Watch a sneak peek of the program, below.

U.S. Postal Service

This summer, the Boy Scouts of America celebrate their 100th anniversary, and the U.S. Postal Service has unveiled a spiffy new stamp to honor the organization.

One of my favorite Scouting quotes comes from Janice Hudson’s Trauma Junkie: Memoirs of an Emergency Flight Nurse. Hudson worked for many years as part of the air ambulance service in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes:

“One of the more frightening community events for CALSTAR [California Shock/Trauma Air Rescue] was the Boy Scout Jamboree. Every year the dreaded memo arrived, followed by frantic phone calls by the scheduled flight crew, who begged for somebody, anybody, to take the loathsome shift….

“Why did everyone dread this particular event? Imagine, if you will, five hundred prepubescent boys, wired on Twinkies, rushing the helicopter. Their first target, invariably, was the antennas. We had a total of five external antennas mounted on the underside of the tailboom and belly, all of which were unbelievably expensive, fragile, and absolutely indispensable to the safe operation of the helicopter. One good grab and the antenna would snap off, leaving us out of service until it could be repaired. After they finished with the antennas, the Boy Scouts wanted in—in the helicopter, that is….

“As we circled overhead, we were filled with a sense of foreboding. The ground below was teeming with kids, who looked like small ants swarming over the large field. They were everywhere….

“When we began the landing, there was a brief bulge in the lines as the kids tried to surge forward. The Scout leaders, battling bravely, held them back…. The lines held, right up to the moment the rotors stopped turning. Despite the troop leaders’ gallant efforts, the kids broke free…. Two hours later, we realized we were lost. Kids continued to swarm over the helicopter like a plague of locusts.”

Hudson fakes an emergency call, and “we lifted off in a cloud of dust, leaving our tormentors behind.”

CALSTAR still makes an annual appearance at the Boy Scout Jamboree.