World Scenic Flights by HeliGraphix

South Korea is a modern country, and even though the capital Seoul is situated slightly more South than Beijing, it is quite cold here. Part of the city looks like many of the modern metropolises, which means life at a fast pace and expensive, many lights and heavy traffic. They give you about 15 seconds to cross the major multi-lane roads. After that the pedestrian lights go to red again and it's waiting for another 5 - 10 minutes. This really trains you to RUN!



What's the best-known monuments in Korea? Well, for one there is the city of Gyeongju, but with 400 km distance it's too far away from here. No need to go there anyway since in Seoul you will find the remains of the Joseon dynasty (15th century). It's basically a town-like structure with a collection of many beautiful buildings, temples and pagodas. Due to vandalism in the past you can only walk through it on guided tours. However, self-guided tours are available on Thursdays - lucky us! We found the office in charge, and the Korean guys there called some nice English-speaking representative. We explained the WSF project, and she seemed less worried about the heli but that we'd have to pay quite a sum to get a permission to take pictures. Sounded reasonably good, so we'd be back the next day (= Thursday).



This morning we walked up to the ticket office and paid the fee for taking pictures as well as the money for the regular entrance tickets. Looked good, so far no trace of problems. The nice lady from the office guided us right to the open space in front of the biggest and most famous palace called Changdeokgung. It's UNESCO world cultural heritage again, by the way (we should ask them for a map with the rest of that stuff :-) ).
The open space turned out to be not as wide as it appeared to be from the pictures; there seems to be a pattern behind this, some clever wide angle photography. It's the same all over the world: You go there, and boom - where's the magic from the pictures?!



After 25 minutes of waiting (did we mention that extra time costs extra money?!) we realized that the constant stream of new guided tours just didn't end. The nice lady said she was surprised, too, but we should start after the current tour had left. There's always one idiot who lags behind the group and has to take 10,000 extra pictures of the same object from angles as different as one arc second. We waited patiently until his guide called out to him, then wound up the rotor.
The first minute was reserved for pictures so the lady and other people would get used to the looks of the heli and that it's safe. Next we pulled out the camera and tried to let the heli fall into the picture, morph it into a pie dish, and then exit to the side. Not trivial in this confined area.

After a total of 4 minutes somebody came running and shouting, and we had to land. The guy was so mad he tried to block my vision of the landing heli. Luckily, Koreans aren't that tall. Anyway, the guy was quite upset and it turned out he was the guide of a group from the building next door, and that people had complained about the noise. Hmm …
Electric helis and blade flutter can cause some resonance, but it is highly unlikely this was louder than all the school kids crying around. What probably happened was that for the four minutes nobody cared about the building, but everybody liked the heli; the guide just couldn't cope with that. After this incident we did not get permission to take off again - because of the noise! We tried hard, but no way.

And here comes the worst: Due to a seemingly trivial camera problem we do not have any recordings at all! I was (and still am) so shocked I refused to speak much.
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