Okay, I know I don't usually talk about work on this site, but this is the big time. Prime time national TV, not just specialty cable channels or the local news. This Sunday, there's going to be a segment on the CarterCopter on 60 Minutes. It's their normal, 7:00 ET program (CBS). Oh, and there's going to be a segment on Discoveries This Week on The Science Channel, plus a story in the local news paper, the Times Record News.
Anyway, I haven't bugged you all before when the CarterCopter was going to be on TV, but I figured that since this one was going to be getting millions of viewers, it was worth mentioning.
Posted by Fatboy at April 13, 2005 05:13 PM"Millions of viewers?" A little presumptive, aren't we? Perhaps a bit full of ourselves?
Just fucking with you...here's hoping a blade doesn't fly off some rotor and decapitate Ed Wallace.
Posted by: Chris at April 13, 2005 07:27 PMAre you going to be in the piece Fatboy?
Consider it Tivo'd
Posted by: Pat at April 13, 2005 08:20 PMHe'll put his piece in you...fag.
Posted by: at April 13, 2005 08:45 PMCool. I wonder how they'll describe what the hell an autogyro is. And then Andy Rooney should come on and comlain about how autogryros are crap, and back in his day, they just flapped their arms a lot to fly. And then his eyebrows will get caught in the rotor and the whole place will asplode.
Good lord, I'm ranting. Time to grab a beer from the vending machine.
Posted by: Rick at April 14, 2005 10:04 AMThe millions of viewers is what the producer told us, so I'm just taking his word for it.
And if I'm on 60 Minutes, it's not going to be a very big part- just them filming me doing work.
That was a hell of a fiasco trying to get the aircraft in flying condition for them coming. We hadn't flown since the previous May, when we got an exhaust leak that started a fire. So, we decided to make a bunch of changes as long as we were down, and the changes took a little longer than we were expecting. Anyway, 60 Minutes was coming in to film that week, and that weekend was our annual shareholders' meeting, and we had told all of them that we would be flying by then. We didn't want to push too much and sacrifice safety, but we really wanted to be flying. So, a week before, we towed the aircraft to the airport and started flight testing, and we had an engine failure. We pull the engine, put in a new one, go to start it up, and find that the engine shop hadn't put all the right parts into the new engine, and it has no oil pressure. So we pull that one, take it back to the engine shop, get them to fix it, and then put it back in the aircraft, and this time it works. But we still need to solve the knocking problem that had caused the previous engine failure, so we end up building a system to change the oxygen sensor readings, so that the enigne will run at a richer air fuel ratio, and put in colder plugs. All of that in less than a week. Anyway, we managed to get it all done, and we were able to taxi the aircraft around when Bob Simon was here (the weather was too bad to fly), and then fly the aircraft the next day in front of a camera crew that 60 Minutes had left behind to film us some more, plus fly for the shareholders.
Posted by: Fatboy at April 14, 2005 10:46 AM