Stratford-based Sikorsky Aircraft, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp. in Hartford, this month marked 75 years of modern helicopter flight that began Sept. 14, 1939, when 50-year-old chief designer and chief test pilot Igor Sikorsky lifted off the ground to tabletop height in an experimental helicopter designated the VS-300.
The first flight began a four-year test program that proved the efficiency of Sikorsky”™s single-rotor design, gave birth to a global helicopter industry and forever changed the course of aviation history, the company said in a statement.
“Tens of thousands of helicopters today fly the world”™s skies, and the configuration almost all of them use is a single main rotor coupled to an anti-torque tail rotor,” said Sikorsky President Mick Maurer. “That configuration was designed and perfected by Igor Sikorsky 75 years ago.”
Igor Sikorsky had tried 30 years earlier, in spring 1909, to build a helicopter at his family home in Kiev, Ukraine. His apparatus consisted of a wood and wire-braced frame built around a 25-horsepower engine connected to a transmission of wooden pulleys and belts that drove coaxial shafts topped with two twin-bladed rotors. He tried again in the spring of 1910, with a second design consisting of two new three-bladed rotors, but the craft could barely lift itself off the ground without a pilot. Realizing that technology would have to catch up with the idea of vertical-lift flight, the young engineer abandoned his dream for a more practical career in fixed-wing aviation.
“The helicopter was always my father”™s first love,” said Sikorsky”™s son and company ambassador Sergei Sikorsky, who also worked as an apprentice mechanic on the VS-300 aircraft. “By the late 1930s, my father wanted to prove that after two aviation careers ”“ in Russia before and during World War I, and in the United States building transoceanic flying boats before the Second World War ”“ that he could design and build a helicopter without knowing how it should be done, and then to try to fly one never having flown one before. That was a challenge many said couldn”™t be done.”
In 1938, Igor Sikorsky made a compelling argument to United Aircraft, now United Technologies Corp. The board of directors gave him and his team $30,000 to test his single-rotor helicopter theory.
