Original Message

The name Michael Maya Charles should be familiar to everyone on this forum.  He's all-around good dude: Writer/author, musician, aircraft owner, pilot...  He's been mostly an airline pilot, but he's also got good helo credentials, typed-in and flying a Skycrane fighting fires.  In other words, he's not just a glorified Robby jockey.  He knows a thing or two about aviation, unlike some of you mental "giants" who post here, for instance.  (It saddens me to say that some of you must be really insuffereable pr*cks in real life.  But hey, if you're a helicopter pilot, that's probably a given.)

Anyway, Michael got invited out to Garmin HQ to fly a Bell 505 with Garmin's latest helicopter autopilot and write about it for Vertical Magazine.  In the article, he says:

"I simply hit the blue LVL button on the cyclic, and the autopilot did a nice job of smoothly returning the ship to straight and level, then holding that basic attitude for the pilot to re-engage an appropriate upper mode..."

If you're at all interested in this new development in helicopter technology (and you should be), you can read the whole article here:

Garmin’s gamechanger: Flying the 600H in the Bell 505 - Vertical Mag