Support Our Advertisers Dick and Carol DeGraw Meanwhile, he had a friend who bought a basic ‘Bensenstyle’ gyropcopter. The friend built it and crashed it. Then he saw Dick’s engines and made an offer. They could build two gyroplanes. Dick would supply the engines and the friend would supply the rest of the parts. That start was in 1993. Then at the 1993 pra convention in Brookville, Ohio, the board of directors announced the pra Autogyro Performance Award, a contest to spur efforts to achieve jump take-off capability in current sport gyroplanes. Prize money, donated from various sources, would be awarded at the Greencastle convention in 1994 to the gyro that could execute a deceptively simple task: lift off and clear a 10-foot obstacle within 50 feet, fly a 20-mile speed course, return, land and perform a normal takeoff. Hearing about the contest, Dick said, “I can do this.” Carol replied, “Sure you can.” There was no winner in ‘94, so the pra upped the ante to $20,000 for the ‘95 convention. That turned out to be the year Dick finished and showed his Gyrhino. Dick won the contest that year—the prize money even paid for ‘some’ of the Gyrhino! For his next project, Dick built a gyroplane with a partially powered rotor for Carol called the DeBird, which made it into a jump gyroplane. Dick makes it clear that Carol is the reason he is able to work on these projects. She encourages him to keep going with his creations. He isn’t just a designer and a builder, he is also an avid flyer. He flies about one quarter of his time in fixed-wing. But three quarters of his flight time he spends in rotorcraft. He probably has set some sort of record with 2570 jump takeoffs under his belt. Dick’s love is designing and building. Even as he was showing this latest project, word leaked out that he is already working on something new. However, good luck getting him to talk about it before it is finished! • Left: You can see some of the custommachine work that went into the Gyrhino. Below: Dick DeGraw picking up one of his awards for the Gyrhino. He won both the Innovation and the Grand Champion Awards at the 2017 PRA convention Gyroplane Innovation Dick’s Background Dick was brought up on a farm and went to the same country grade school that his dad did, kindergarten through 8th grade. After he got married to Carol at age 26, he left the farm. He hated farming, but he liked being assigned to fix things around the farm. When he was four or five years old he made his first toy out of can covers, nails and a board. It was a truck to push around. Soon he was interested in electrical wiring. His mother remembered him having imaginary wires strung around the floor that she couldn’t step on. Then he would take radios apart and save the pieces in match boxes. Later when he was 10, he wired his little shop in the basement with a three-way switch. By 12 he was trying to rewind electric motors. At age 13 he took a television completely apart, unsoldered it himself, and reassembled it according to the schematics. He wanted to get into ham radio, but he was too shy when he was young to get on the air. Some of that shyness came from being dyslexic. He didn’t even know he was dyslexic until he was 35 years old, he just figured that he “was dumb.” His inability to read well made him introverted since he didn’t want anyone to know about it. It was a painful thing for him to be somewhere where he had to demonstrate reading. He has gotten over the introversion and educated himself on all of the skills it takes to design and build gyroplanes. Dick’s very first project was a home-built helicopter. Not only did Carol ‘let’ him work on the helicopter, she encouraged him to work on it. It takes someone special to have that kind of confidence in your work. One might assume that he did a lot of reading and research to learn how to do the things he does. It turns out that he still doesn’t read much. In fact, he has only read one book in his entire life from cover to cover. He actually read it twice: “Pioneering The Helicopter” by Charles Lester Morris, who was Igor Sikorski’s first test pilot. But he didn’t read it until after he built his helicopter! Dick tried formally studying helicopters, but formal study involved a lot of math. And the math-focused texts didn’t make a lot of sense to him. Instead, he would go up to any helicopter he could find. He would ask questions, but unfortunately helicopter pilots weren’t a lot of help explaining helicopter design. They knew how to fly them, not design them. But when he asked the pilots if he could move the controls, they would all allow him to do that. Even though every helicopter is different, he would still move the controls and then see what was going on with the aircraft. That way he could get an idea of ratios and things like that. After a couple of years of doing that, he finally understood what a helicopter had to do to fly. Once he knew that, then he was able to design one. Getting into gyroplanes was a story unto itself. He took his helicopter to Oshkosh in 1986 where he won Grand Champion rotorcraft. With that project finished, he wanted to build another helicopter. So he bought two Rotax engines while he was there. He brought them home and began preliminary design work for a helicopter. He decided that he didn’t want those two-stroke engines in his helicopter, so he set the engines aside.
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