Appears Enstrom ~ a company as old as myself ~ is yet to rise from administration like a phoenix. The company was started by someone with no knowledge of aeronautical engineering, but ample enthusiasm (which gives us all hope). But it was the steed of choice for Dennis Kenyon, who passed a year prior to the demise of the company.
I've chanced upon some remarkable pilots unknowingly in years past. One an old man whom I used to pass with a cheery greeting outside the hangar in Bournemouth we were both frequenting whilst he was flight-testing a single-engined turbine aircraft. It turned out to have been Neville Duke, one-time holder of the world speed record.
Dennis I also shared hangar-space with whilst scratching a living a fixed-wing QFI. He returned to flying helicopters later in life from necessity, and for the same reason most men of advanced years with whom I once shared a cockpit did so: divorce. But I witnessed one of the most heart-stopping aerobatic displays I have ever seen, before discovering only now ~ some thirty years on ~ that it was a world champion that I was watching.
I recall how telling me that to refine his craft on the Enstrom they would fix a strip of balsa on the tail-boom to see how close during maneuvers the main-rotor came to slicing through the tail-boom.
We shall never see his like again... or theirs.
