As some of you are probably aware by now, I've taken up flying, specifically in gyroplane aircraft. Like every endeavor in life we find ourselves wondering if our pastimes might be deleterious to our spiritual life, or somehow outside of God's Will for us. As I've gotten more deeply involved in gyroplanes and their community, I've found myself wondering whether something I'm so thoroughly enjoying from a purely temporal perspective could be harming my spiritual life or somehow endangering my salvation. Could this temporal pursuit actually become an idol? Then I started stumbling on some fascinating information about the two primary inventors of these aircraft. As I discovered more, the story became so compelling I felt I needed to collect it and write it down. I have not seen this perspective on our community's origins collected anywhere else. With a friend in California, I created a Facebook group to discuss gyroplanes from a common man's grassroots perspective 5 months ago. It's such an obscure Facebook group regarding such a small segment of our larger gyroplane community I really didn't expect much to come of it. In a gyroplane community that has been overtaken by $100k European style gyroplanes, our group is dedicated helping to rebuild the bottom rung of gyroplane ownership, namely by helping gyroplane homebuilders and those trying to restore older affordable gyroplanes. But it already has over 500 members in that 5 months. Today I posted the following reflection to my Facebook group. I created this "icon" type image below using AI, with care not to include halos or religious terms common to Eastern Orthodox icons. I'm not trying to canonize these men, and I don't intend any sacrilege in using an icon style image for them, but I do want fellow believers in our little gyroplane community to grasp where our aircraft community got its start. I find it very comforting.
The spiritual roots of our gyroplane passion Please, if this is not your “thing,” just scroll on past this post, but respect our right to share this history among fellow believers on our little Facebook Grassroots Gyro group page. Since I’m going to be involved in a faith based book study discussing CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters with several close friends, and what has brought all of us together as brothers in Christ is our mutual passion for gyroplanes, I would like to share some observations I’ve gathered while looking into the roots of modern gyroplanes (through my own reading and research, and with the help of the AlterAI search bot). Juan de la Cierva y Codorníu — often styled as Señor Don Juan de la Cierva, Conde de la Cierva — is the inventer of the autogiro, know variously today as the gyroplane, gyrocopter or autogyro. De la Cierva was a Spanish Roman Catholic by upbringing and personal identification. He was born in Murcia, Spain (1895), into a prominent aristocratic and deeply traditional Catholic family. His personal alignment with the Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War (1936) — helping facilitate Franco’s flight from the Canary Islands to Morocco — also reflected his ideological and spiritual sympathies. The Nationalist cause was explicitly Catholic and anti-atheist, opposing the secularist and anti-clerical tendencies of the Republican government. His Catholic moral framework also influenced his engineering ethos — he viewed scientific innovation not as rebellion against faith, but as an expression of divine order through rational creation. This outlook mirrors many of Spain’s early technologists, who saw no contradiction between invention and belief. After witnessing fatal aircraft crashes — including his own failed bomber project in 1919 that killed a test pilot - Cierva became intensely focused on creating an aircraft that would not stall, and thus would protect human life even if engines failed. He saw engineering not as a quest for dominance or speed, but as a moral vocation — a way to restore harmony between human innovation and divine order. This motivation mirrored older Catholic thinkers like Raimon Llull or even Pascal: the idea that reason and invention were instruments of divine stewardship. His invention of the autorotating rotor - which let aircraft gently descend even in engine failure — was not just technological genius, but a response to what he himself described as the "mortal flaw" in fixed-wing design. In that sense, the autogiro can be read almost as a mechanical act of mercy - a design to safeguard pilots rather than risk them for progress. Juan de la Cierva’s faith wasn’t incidental background; it shaped the moral architecture of his invention. Through Catholic eyes, his creation of a self‑stabilizing aircraft wasn’t just an engineering feat — it was an act of moral craftsmanship, fusing reason with reverence for life. His autogiro embodied the ultimate synthesis of Catholic ethics and engineering rationality: the pursuit of mastery over nature only insofar as it preserves and protects the soul that dares to fly. The invention of the helicopter, based directly on de la Cierva’s ground breaking development of an effective rotor mechanism for his autogiro, temporarily halted further development of the autogiro prior to and during WWII because of the tactical superiority of the helicopter However, during the war German u-boats used towed gyrogliders as mobile surveillance platforms while at sea. After WWII Igor Bensen picked up where Juan de la Cierva’s untimely death in a small airliner crash in 1936 left off. Igor Bensen developed his gyroglider based on the u-boats’ gyrogliders captured during the war. He subsequently added an engine with a pusher prop behind the pilot, inventing the basic modern pusher gyroplane configuration best known today. In the intro to Igor Bensen’s autobiography, his coauthor states Igor was granted an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree and became a Russian Orthodox priest in the 1960s. He wrote his thesis on the Shroud of Turin and postulated that the image of Christ on the Shroud was formed by a very intense and instantanious electromagnetic energy event at the moment of the Resurrection. The idea that the formation of the Shroud image was the result of a flash of electromagnetic radiation was first proposed in 1930, but it was an obscure theory that was largely forgotten till the 1990s. However, Bensen was not only aware of the theory in the 1960s, he actually wrote his thesis on it. We believers should find it comforting to know Bensen was not just a scientist and a great pioneer in aviation, he was also a committed Christian who went on to become a Russian Orthodox priest. He was keenly aware of not only the Shroud of Turin, but its possible creation via an intense electromagnetic burst at the precise moment of the Resurrection. As a committed Catholic Christian, I have a newfound respect for both de la Cierva and Igor Bensen, who could well be seen as “patron saints” of sorts for gyroplane pilots today.
Of course I’m not saying that just because I perceive Christian roots to the specific type of aircraft and its community I’m currently involved with, that it can’t be something that threatens to take me away from Jesus.
Indeed! I tweaked the prompts to get the AI icon to more closely resemble the historical photos of the de la Cierva and Bensen gyroplanes and removed the extra gyroplane between them. Frankly I’m dumbfounded that a rank amateur at prompting an AI bot can produce this “icon” image simply based on repeated and more specific text prompts. A close friend paints beautiful traditional icons: I texted him this AI digital edition of the gyroplane inventors’ icon today and he was astounded at the quality of the AI image just based on my series of text prompts.
