Mar 31, 2009: Hotelicopter

For those of you uneffected by the economic turmoil and are looking for a way to spend the lumps out your mattress, here you go.

Hoax!

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2009/03/the-hotelicopte.html

Great. There go my plans for the summer.
Still, I've had a really interesting offer to buy a bridge in a town called Brooklyn...

That thing is huge. Not something I want to fly in. I doubt auto-rotation could be achieve in that big assed rock.

The blades look too small to lift that behemoth.

Sort of like a fat kid wearing a propeller beanie.

I hope you got permission to post that picture of Barney Frank.

...and ALF

Quote:

Originally Posted by spudcon I hope you got permission to post that picture of Barney Frank.

It looks like the space shuttle and a Chinook helicopter had some sort of unholy mating.

What a waste of a helicopter. I mean those things are meant for quickness and mobility. Not rich people sleeping quarters.

The pictures look like what good digital artists are capable of rendering these days. But it's all just a little too perfect. The lighting is utterly uniform. The other elements in the shots, like the two accompanying helicopters, are almost cartoonish. I find even the placement of the people in shot 4 to be bogus-feeling. The clouds look like a decision to not show it in sunlight where more detail would have to come out, and the rendered fuzziness would seem fake. The jetway in Bruce's shot above looks particularly suspect, the letters on it appear to be anti-aliased (which doesn't happen in real life) and unweathered.

According to the ever accurate Wikipedia posting for that helicopter model, one was retained by the manufacturing plant while the other went to the museum. The website for that "hotelicopter" states they obtained theirs from said factory. So that part checks out... in theory. But that said all the "photos" look like 3D renderings with just a little too much gloss and reflection added to make it look more real. Also the purported video of it "in action" is way too smooth at certain points to make it even remotely believable.

All the pictures are artist's renderings, as I would expect from someone trying to entice people to part with large sums of money. The whole thing reeks of a scam, a physical impossibility, but after Branson's Space Plane, who knows.
If they said they had done it, I'd say bullshit. When they say they're going to do it, I'll say show me.

All the pictures are artist's renderings

They're claiming real, and they're claiming the video is real too!

If the pictures are real, they've been photoshopped enough to make HDR look like tintypes.

Kind of reminds me of this...

Was this an April Fool's story that somebody let out too early?

"The Soviets only built two. One crashed in 1968..."

...while it was attempting to airlift a valuable meteorite from Arizona?

Chopper on googlemaps in Moscow?

I checked googlemaps for "Panki-Tomilino", and look what I found at 55.66733,37.932057
To me it looks like the chopper described above.
Maybe this is the location of the Moscow openair museum?

A quick search for the Russian words helicopter hotel reveal nothing ...

That "Hotelicopter" pic looks SO fake, I'm not even going to comment...Wait, damn!

For the record, even if it is real--that all-white glossy plastic furniture in the rooms is not what I would call "five-star." Luxury, indeed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kolbenfresser I checked googlemaps for "Panki-Tomilino", and look what I found at 55.66733,37.932057 To me it looks like the chopper described above. Maybe this is the location of the Moscow openair museum?