The helicopter in the pic is an American Revolution 40. It was one of the very first (if not the first) American manufactured chopper to the US market. Previously there had only been a couple out of Germany if my memory serves me correct.

It has a floating vs rigid rotor head. Of course there was no radio mixing in those days. Originally, it did not have collective but was upgraded to a primitive collective system using only one servo for throttle and collective.

As well, there was no gyro in those days. Mine came with a K&B 40 and some time later upgraded to a HB 40.

The pilot is the period character Fonzi, donated by the toy store/hobby shop owner a Mr Bill Kleeb, brother to one of the spinster sisters on the Waltons... you know the caretakers of their late fathers recipe.

In that era, one magazine writer when referring to helicopters described them this way, "Flying them is quite similar to standing on a beach ball in a swimming pool."

Actually it provided a half dozen successful flights where it was flown around a bit and returned to a safe landing. It did provide hours of hovering but not with the stock skids as it would tip over very easily. If it wasn't set down very gently, the floating head would allow one blade to go down very close to the boom and then just a little more flex and whack.

The most interesting story about the Revolution however is that while I was flying mine, the Nationals was won by a 14 yr old boy who had owned his for only two weeks and he'd never flown chopper before. Of course in those days the Nationals routine was simply a baseball diamond course, take off from home plate, make the bases and return. Keep in mind that most if not all other contestants were old geezers who had invested a great many hours at machining a scratch build chopper.

Another quick story... in those days we didn't have many frequencies and it was a sin to tie one up on a Sunday afternoon doing any extensive engine tuning. So, Sunday morning before church, I was on the front lawn adjusting the carb on the K&B 40 that had suffered some dirt in the pesky Perry carb. The mixture needle had been removed and replaced and needed readjusted. It was a little rich and four stroking and as the needle was tweaked, it broke into two stroking with considerably more power (remember, it had no collective). It lurched into the air as I grabbed the boom and it lifted me from my lying down position to my knees and apparent that it was going to rotate an arc around my grasp and come after me unless either one of two events took place. Either let go of it or shut down the throttle stick on the radio sitting in the grass. Luckily the other hand was just in reach of the stick.

Very very primitive compared to modern helicopter and radio technology.

Because the original thread was about flight simulator programs, I raised the point about early hardware heli simulators long before the days of computer simulators. 

The decks were home built with a plywood platform to strap the chopper to. The platform would tilt about twenty degrees in two axis and the platform was attached to a dowel shaft that would rise about thirty inches and of course rotate.  These simulators allowed four axis of movement... pitch, yaw, rotation and elevation but kept the heli tethered to prevent mishap during training.   An elderly gentleman in our club had a very nice German produced Bell Jet Ranger .60 size and if my memory serves me correct was restricted to the simulator and never experienced free flight.

These physical simulators were a must to prepare for flight. The most sophisticated of the simulators was offered in a rag article where the builder had placed a ring lip around the deck periphery and a small hole in the center. On the deck a marble was placed and the task was to avoid having the marble jump the lip off the platform and to work the marble and drop it through the center hole.

I thought your chopper friends might be interested...