Ground school
How a gyroplane flies
Autorotation, the driving and driven regions, why forward airspeed matters and what happens when the engine stops.
Not flight instruction and not an approved course. An instructor rated for gyroplanes on your type is where training happens. Find one near you.
Start here
The rotor is not driven by the engine. Air passing up through the disc turns it, continuously, throughout the flight. That single fact explains most of what follows: why the aircraft needs forward airspeed, why it cannot hover in still air, and why an engine failure is a descent rather than a loss of lift.
The full treatment, with the diagram, is on what is autorotation. Read that before going on.
The vocabulary you will meet
An instructor will use these on day one and a logbook or listing will use them without explanation. Each links to a full definition.
- Rotor disc and blowback
- Prerotation, and why it shortens the ground roll rather than sustaining the rotor
- Rotor RPM, and why the numbers are in your flight manual and not here
- Power push over, and why it is a reason to get type-specific instruction
Check yourself
The knowledge quiz draws from this material. Every answer links back to the page it came from, so a wrong answer is a link to the explanation rather than just a cross.
