Dinosaur Extinction

The last R44 I saw before our trip away was in Peter Boyle's place. Well bits of it were! It looked like a build-your-own chopper kit gone wrong. There was shiny black main rotor blade resembling one of those figure eight beer pretzels, a polished tail boom in the shape of a 'V' and a cabin that looked like it had been used a tree lopper!

When I queried the guys as to the history of the wreckage, it turned out the cabin HAD been use as a tree lopper. The near new machine had sheared a magneto drive shaft over the Mornington peninsula & subsequently levelled several hundred metres of undergrowth. "Bet the owner was pissed off", I mused. "Grateful more like", says Peter, "they were heading for Tasmania!"

The next R44 I saw was the following morning at Maitland. Unusually for a forty-four, Romeo Oscar Mike's unique livery was visible before we heard the characteristic thunp-thump noise print. She pulled in awesome & slick next to the little line of R22s and a throng of pilots made the dash to hold their blades against the substantial 44 wash. It was a far cry from the sad little pile of scrap I'd seen the day before.

After a few days of watching this machine glide effortlessly past me I nick named her the 'Newcastle Flyer'. The 'flyer' was impressive passing at close quarters, with a paint job that always caught your peripheral vision, a wake turbulence that discouraged tail gating and a dead level attitude that engendered a sense of purpose to every overtake. I was envious & broke whatever commandment it is that says "thou shalt not covert thy neighbour's helicopter". Once I tried catching up, 27" MP, stick forward, 10 kts on the ASI (second time around). It did no good. She just took slightly longer to recede to a dot in the distance.

In fact ROM overtakes reminded me of a cartoon I once saw in the nineteen sixties, when the Russians still had the upper hand in the space race. There was this drawing of two yanks crammed like sardines into Gemini capsule. Passing them was what could only be described as a luxury space liner. It had the hammer & sickle motif on the upper deck, couples dancing on the mid deck (you could see them through the landscape windows) and a row of portholes along the lower deck. The caption read, "We're the eight thirty five out of Omsk, who in the blazes are you?"

Yep the 44 was impressive. She left last & arrived first, could work two frequencies at once, came fully equipped with picnic set & goodies and blew pigs over at fifty paces. She was the epitome of travelling luxury & her two pilots were the embodiment of good airmanship.

After our trip I never thought much more about 'Read Only Memory' until I found myself one day helping my youngest with a school project about Dinosaurs. We were cruising the Net & discovered that hot favourite as the cause of Dinosaur extinction was a massive dust cloud that blocked out the sun, causing global temperatures to plummet. The dust cloud was apparently caused by a meteor impact, but I could not help wondering to myself if maybe Bruce & his machine had discovered time travel?