The metal artist and aircraft maintenance engineer Chuck Teschke parked at the event horizon of an emotional black hole and resolved to go no further.
This topic — helicopters-as-art — was so intricate and meaningful, he thought he might weep.
“You could get me tearing up if I really wanted to go down the rabbit hole of the achievement of rotary-wing flight,” said Teschke, 61, an Instagram celebrity from Edmonton, Alberta, known for his viral “Frankencopter” art installations.
“They’re such complex pieces of equipment,” he said. “There’s so much to them, compared to a fixed-wing aircraft, that the amazement never goes away.
“That many pieces have been designed to interact and develop such a dependable and useful machine … and what it can do, almost nothing else can. It’s in a class of its own.”
Teschke is many things: A long-tenured mechanic with nearly four decades of experience, a proud Canadian, an effective-but-inelegant welder, and a self-assured aviation connoisseur with loads of geeky swagger and a snow-white soul patch hanging from his lower lip.
There is ample proof of this on social media, where he documents wildly-popular Frankencopter projects that merge helicopter chassis with auto parts and farm machinery to create fascinating—and un-flyable—rotorcraft sculptures.
But perhaps more than anything else, Teschke is an engineer with an artist’s soul and an earnest sense of responsibility.
“I think I’m paying a bit of extra respect to both the people [who created, maintained and flew them], and the machines, by delaying the step to the scrap heap,” he said.
“The creative side is the biggest thing.”
The newest Frankencopter, nicknamed the VW Air Bus or Hippie Heli, is a seamless amalgamation of an Airbus AS350 chassis and an engineless Volkswagen mini-bus.
High Alpine Helicopters, an approved maintenance organization in Prince George, British Columbia, donated the aircraft, and Teschke found the van through a VW collector named Ryan Simpson, who he said has two properties with retired vehicles near Edmonton.
“We just walked through a field and picked one that was really in rough shape at the bottom end,” said Teschke. Modifying vintage VW buses can be controversial, given how rare they are, but he figures this project gets a pass.
“This one had no metal roof; it had a fibreglass recreation, so it was a perfect candidate for this,” said Teschke. “We could explain that to any of the purists that would happen upon the media coverage or Internet coverage of it, and I’m happy to say we didn’t piss anybody off too much.”
The Hippie Heli came together in about 10 months and 900 man-hours. Teschke did all the work himself at his family’s acreage in rural Alberta, with parts from several other sources.
A friend connected him with a set of hail-damaged AStar rotor blades that aren’t serviceable but work well as showpieces, and a local helicopter MRO shop donated a set of corroded landing gear cross tubes, which Teschke used to piece together a set of welded skids.
He wished to thank the helicopter community for rallying behind these projects, particularly in Canada.
“All the helicopter-looking parts are decommissioned, time-expired, basically byproducts of the usual attrition,” he said.
“I never ask for anything for free; I always try and pay the most I can. But a lot of times people just sit there and go, ‘I don’t need that money, these are yours,’ and they just give them to me.”
The Frankencopter name isn’t a direct a take on Frankenstein’s monster; it’s a nod to Eddie Van Halen’s iconic Frankenstein guitar, which is said to have been cobbled together from disparate parts.
(Teschke is also an avowed metalhead and an amateur musician; he’s posted several videos of himself on IG, shredding on a customized Flying-V-style six-string.)
“It’s not technically perfect, it’s not craftsmanship-perfect, it’s just kind of Frankencoptered together,” he said.
Other projects in the series include the Heli-Harvester, which melded the cabin of a grain harvesting machine with a Bell 406 chassis; and a gyrocopter-helicopter mash-up. Teschke’s latest product will amalgamate a retired Aérospatiale SA 315B Lama with the front end of a vintage VW Bug.
All the completed Frankencopters are on display at Teschke’s rural property, and technically they’re not for sale—although he acknowledged, “everything’s for sale at the right price.
“If somebody was to offer me a kind of a—you know, ‘I can’t refuse it for that price,’ then I would sell it.”
He’s considering selling the Hippie Heli to an investor who might turn it into an Airbnb. The tentative price is C$75,000, which would make a tidy profit from the roughly $10,000 it cost to produce.
“Art is really only worth what the beholder wants, so the range is huge,” he said.
Like many aircraft mechanics, Teschke views every helicopter as more than the sum of its parts. He marvels at the ingenuity required to design, build, fly, and maintain them, and he has a deep and abiding respect for every person involved in that process.
“I worked on certain tail numbers that I saw off and on my whole career, and they go from inanimate object to actual personality,” he said.
“And the people that work on them and fly them have a personality too. The guys that flew them and the guys that fixed them, they’re being pushed to the scrap heap or the shredder … these pilots and engineers were the guys that were right on the tip of the spear fighting forest fires, aerial cranes lifting the top on the CN Tower, and stuff like that.
“The machines, and the people, are ending up in the old folks’ home, so to speak.”
If the purpose of art is to capture beauty and to chase away fear, or—as Tolstoy believed—to transfer a feeling from the artist to his audience, it can also preserve and reinterpret the past.
Teschke is quick to acknowledge there is not much room in helicopter maintenance for creativity; regulations require a great deal of rote work with no tolerance for deviation.
By surrendering the desire to fly his machines, he opens up a world of creative possibilities.
“I call them abstract ultra-realism,” he said. “It’s abstract in the sense that you never see these things combined, but it’s so legitimate-looking and so believable because I’m using parts and pieces from actual helicopters and other forms of transportation.
“This concept resonates with a lot of serious aviation maintenance specialists,” he added.
“There’s a light side to everybody that they want to feed with these things … art doesn’t necessarily have a purposeful existence. It’s all about stimulation. It’s not about anything that makes sense.”