Of course they are bit more pricey than a gyrobee.I first got interested in the RAF 2000 about a year ago, as a cheaper substitute for a helicopter. If you want something a bit more fancy, modern, sexy looking, and probably designed and built right (unlike an RAF), take a look a Xenon. If the companies flight instructors can’t stay alive in em, what chance does low hour joe blow the unknowing customer have? A gyrobee looks like flying lawn chair, but probably has one of the best safety records around (one? death in decades?) An RAF gyrocopter looks almost like a “real” helicopter and also looks quite sexy, but IMO (and many others as well) it is a fucking death trap, even for the companies own flight instructors. I think I’d trust a Bentley, since I’ve heard of them but some of the ones I haven’t heard of just look rickety. One of my favourite things in a helicopter is doing autorotations, and an autogyro is in autorotation all the time! But I know little about the different ones out there.

‘A non-volatile, random-access storage medium. A gyro is about the simplist and most compact thing you can fly. Yeah, helios are better if you have to TAKE OFF vertically, but that literally comes at a BIG cost, ie lots of money and complexity. Its a real maze of stupidity and misinformation for sure. Then, you have the problem that very few people seem to truelly understand how they work, including officials at the FAA and a good fraction of the folks that are flight instructors.

AFAIK, only one person has died flying that model. Look up “gyrobee” for something relatively safe and cheap.

IN THEORY, they should be the safest and cheapest thing around for slow speed recreational flight. Its just now coming out of it, but it appears to be an uphill battle. The death trap reputation the gyro group rightfully earned has haunted it for decades. I could have made the statistical argument that just about any activity (including free climbing, base jumping, and being an astronaut) was safer than that bunch of yahoos. I followed a group for a while a few years back. Then a bunch of idiots that didnt have a clue about physics or aerodynamics started building them and dieing in droves due to piss poor designs, macho attitudes, terrible construction and operational practices, and just plain tarditude.

Raf gyro safety