Yer rich, your businesses are doing well, you aren't yet a hermit living in a hotel in Las Vegas and there's all this war surplus laying around - what's a feller to do?
Simple enough. You go all "Junkyard Wars" and build a heavy lift helo from spare parts laying around. The Hughes XH-17.
Your front wheels came from a B-25 Mitchell and the rear wheels from a C-54 Skymaster. The fuel tank is a bomb bay-mounted unit from a B-29 Superfortress. You get a cockpit from a Waco CG-15 and the tail rotor from a Sikorsky H-19. You set a record that still holds for the largest rotor system in the world... as well as about the most inefficient.
The propulsion system used two turbojet engines. But not very efficiently. You fired 'em up and then sent bleed air up through the rotor hub. The blades were hollow, and the very hot compressed air traveled through the blades to burners at the tips where fuel was injected. Got that? We've got two turbojet engines burning to provide hot, compressed air to flow through the blades where fuel is injected into burners (virtual ramjets, I guess) in the tips of the blades to spin 'em. The rotors spun at a dawdling 88 rpm. This did have the benefit of reducing torque - and allows for that comparatively small tail rotor. Only one of these things was built - and one reason might be that while it could lift 15 metric tons, it had a range of 40 miles, what with all that fuel burning to such little effect...
So, Bill - how'd it fly? Because it *did* fly.
If you've got the software, and would like to fly one yourself... click here.
H/t CAPT H for a pointer to the Wikipedia article.
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