A captive helicopter is a

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attributes ...

which is tethered to the ground with a rope, as with a captive balloon. Captive helicopters can be used for the same purposes as captive balloons. A primary advantage of captive helicopters is that they can be more accurately steered than captive balloons or

kite A kite is a tethered heavier-than-air or lighter-than-air craft with wing surfaces that react against the air to create lift and drag forces. A kite consists of wings, tethers and anchors. Kites often have a bridle and tail to guide the fac ...

s in order to compensate for the influence of the wind. A further advantage is that, unlike kites, they can be launched in the absence of wind. Their main disadvantages are that they require power for their flight and are very noisy. Unlike kites (which rely solely on the wind for power) and balloons (which require specialty lighter-than-air gases), helicopters are normally powered by aviation fuels. However, it is possible to run captive helicopters electrically by running a cable inside the tether line holding the helicopter. In 1887, Parisian electrical engineer

Gustave Trouvé Gustave Pierre Trouvé (2 January 1839 – 27 July 1902) was a French electrical engineer and inventor in the 19th century. Trouvé was born on 2 January 1839 in La Haye-Descartes (Indre-et-Loire, France) and died on 27 July 1902 in Paris. A pol ...

demonstrated his tethered electric model helicopter at a meeting of the French Association for the Advancement of Sciences in Toulouse. At the end of the 1930s, the German company

Telefunken Telefunken was a German radio and television apparatus company, founded in Berlin in 1903, as a joint venture of Siemens & Halske and the ''Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft'' (AEG) ('General electricity company'). The name "Telefunken" ap ...

tried to make a longwave transmission experiment with a captive helicopter driven with a three-phase, AC-power engine. The helicopter should have reached a height of 1000 metres. Because of

electrostatic charge Electric charge is the physical property of matter that causes charged matter to experience a force when placed in an electromagnetic field. Electric charge can be ''positive'' or ''negative'' (commonly carried by protons and electrons respectiv ...

s induced by earth's electric field, the fuses melted when the captive helicopter reached a height of 750 metres and the captive helicopter landed roughly.Klawitter, Gerd; Herold Klaus; Oexner, Michael (2000). ''Langwellen- und Längstwellenfunk''. Germany: Siebel Verlag. {{ISBN, 3-922221-48-3.

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Electric Tethered Observation Platform (modern captive electric helicopter)

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See also