In a cluttered shed at the back of his Oregon ranch house, Curtis Barnes is planning the maiden flight of what he hopes will be the world’s first human-powered helicopter. Using wire and wood, space-age plastics and carbon fiber, Barnes has spent hundreds of hours putting his 'Tipsy Bee’ together -- one screw at a time. Now he’s finishing the craft -- attaching 36 blades made of balsa wood and Mylar to two huge rotors. These are connected by a 40-foot bicycle chain to a contraption resembling an exercise bike. Sitting in the bike seat, the pilot pumps with his arms and legs to power the copter.
“No question but that it can be done,” Barnes says, smiling just a little. The 85-year-old widower knows all the difficulties involved -- he’s been trying for 18 years to get a Tipsy Bee airborne. This latest version, he hopes, may even win the elusive, $20,000 Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition. The contest, sponsored by the American Helicopter Society, advises in the official rules that “intending entrants . . . hold adequate insurance.”
Barnes was interested in flight -- and flights of fancy -- before he arrived at Stanford in 1931. As a teenager on the farm where he lives today, he built a glider out of bamboo poles and cloth and soared down from the hills. At Stanford, he majored in psychology and earned a master’s in graphic arts. He also worked for 60 cents an hour in the lab at the Guggenheim wind tunnel on campus, where aeronautical engineers tested models of wings and planes.
Barnes’s first job was at the Disney studios, where he worked with animators on Bambi, Pinocchio and Fantasia. After service in the Navy during World War II, he returned to his boyhood home to raise a family, grow pears and, later, to run an air freight company. But he was always tinkering. Amid his orchards are buildings filled with his projects -- a huge half-finished boat, a motorcycle, helicopter engines and a flying car (an old Subaru that never got off the ground).
The Tipsy Bee, which got its name from his pear operation (“we had stationery left over,” he says) will start trials this fall. But given the configuration of the rotor wings, Barnes says that it will “actually be flying on a bubble of air.” He hopes that the novel design of the Bee’s rotor blades, its light weight and the strength and power of his 125-pound grandson are the right combination to make history.
And what of flying it himself? He won’t rule it out. “I can put out a horsepower for a few seconds,” he says with a determined smile.
