The Kaman K-1200 K-MAX “aerial truck” is the world’s first helicopter specifically designed, tested, and certified for repetitive external lift operations and vertical reference flight.
C-FXFT, a 1994 Kaman K-1200 at the Courtenay Air Park
This is an interesting helicopter as does not have a tail rotor, and has a set of two intermeshing rotors turning in opposite directions, with each rotor mast mounted with a slight angle to the other, in a transversely symmetrical manner, so that the blades intermesh without colliding.
The rotor blades are built with a wooden spar and fiberglass trailing edge sections. Wood was chosen for its damage tolerance, fatigue resistance and to take advantage of field experience and qualification data amassed from a similar spar on the HH-43 helicopter, built for the U.S. Air Force.
