dennis skills are on display at an air show in utah in june of 2008, and one person eager to see it, and videotape it, is tina tyler, an american gyrocopter pilot. i packed up my gyro and headed out to utah with my camera in hand. for dennis, there s a setback at the beginning of the event. the helicopter, a schweitzer, is unfamiliar and it s heavier than he s used to. i normally fly with ten gallons on board, which weighs 80 pounds, 72, in fact, and i had 30 on board, three times the weight. as dennis takes off, he s aware of another element that will have a major impact on his performance. the air park had two things going for it. it was high and it was hot, 96 degrees that day. both those factors spelled danger for a pilot. in utah, it s about 5,000 feet elevation and it was a warm day that day.
i m going to die if i don t get out of this quickly. dennis kenyon, a former british royal air force pilot, is a legendary flyer who has logged thousands of hours aloft. i m up to 14,000 flying hours. i ve flown 124 different types of airplane which includes 34 helicopters. his aeronautic skills are on display in numerous feature films. i ve done, i don t know, probably a couple dozen feature films. i did spy who loved me, blackhawk down. and he serves as a flight safety expert. my job is going around, looking at shows, and making certain they are safe and watching other pilots. what he s most famous for is helicopter aerobatic flying. since 1986, dennis has been a leading competitor, winning the world championship in 1992. one of the cups up there behind me is for the first place.
he actually wasn t even hurt that bad. a few cuts on the face and couple of teeth knocked out, i understand. the chopper has not fared as well. the helicopter was totaled, completely totaled. unusable. within an hour, a rueful dennis is not just walking and talking, he s giving the news conference he had always hoped to avoid. dennis, the safety evaluator, has to assess his own performance and realizes where he d gone wrong. he d forgotten one adjustment to his program and had fallen victim to the high density altitude at the airfield that day. as soon as i started the maneuver, i thought this helicopter is performing fairly normally so i ran in at the normal height, at the normal speed. he was too low and too slow for this place and time. there wasn t sufficient air space to recover. at that density. on a cold day in england, it would be more than adequate. in the 50 years prior to his crash, at least ten american and european pilots died doing this
dennis skills are on display at an air show in utah in june of 2008, and one person eager to see it, and videotape it, is tina tyler, an american gyrocopter pilot. i packed up my gyro and headed out to utah with my camera in hand. for dennis, there s a setback at the beginning of the event. the helicopter, a schweitzer, is unfamiliar and it s heavier than he s used to. i normally fly with ten gallons on board, which weighs 80 pounds, 72, in fact, and i had 30 on board, three times the weight. as dennis takes off, he s aware of another element that will have a major impact on his performance. the air park had two things going for it. it was high and it was hot, 96 degrees that day. both those factors spelled danger for a pilot. in utah, it s about 5,000 feet elevation and it was a warm day that day. this creates a condition
loop, a shocking event. when he was doing his wing over and he was coming straight to the ground, i m thinking at that point, i hope he can pull out of this. i was already aligning the machine for the next maneuver. it just struck the ground. son of a [ bleep ]. call 911! i thought that was it. he was gone. but dennis is not dead. merely stunned. how did he get here? the aircraft broke up about me and the glass shattered and i was in the desert dust. everybody was in shock. i mean, it was a moment of total, oh my god, what do we do. dennis is not out of danger. he struggles to get free of the wreckage before dripping fuel can ignite the helicopter. i m going to die if i don t get out of this quickly, if it catches on fire. he quickly shuts off the fuel lines, then amazingly, he crawls out of the chopper, shaken but only slightly hurt.