Helicopter Flown Successfully (Sep, 1940)
Filed under: Aviation, Origins — @ 1:48 pm
Source: Popular Science ( More articles from this issue )
Issue: Sep, 1940
| Buy on Ebay
Source: Popular Science ( More articles from this issue )
Issue: Sep, 1940
| Buy on Ebay
Wow that’s a lot of deflection on those rotors in the top picture.
I think this is actually only the first U.S. helicopter.
Helicopter Flown Successfully
WHAT is claimed to be the first successfully controlled vertical flight in a heavier-than-air machine was made recently by Ivor Sikorsky, prominent aeronautical engineer, at Bridgeport, Conn., in his new helicopter. Powered by a seventy-horsepower engine and equipped with variable-pitch rotor blades, the craft moved straight up from the ground for thirty feet, circled the field, and then settled vertically to the ground. Small rotor blades mounted on the bare fuselage of the craft act as elevators and rudder. Sikorsky is shown at the controls of the helicopter in the photographs.
1st u.s. helicopter flown successfully?…now it is: “FULLY CONTROLLED” : by the u.s. (regardless of its original origin) and most likely the reason they say “claimed” to be
Comment by simone — August 17, 2006 @ 3:08 pm
Of course, Sikorsky’s name is Igor, not Ivor.
Comment by Anonymous — August 17, 2006 @ 11:47 pm
Sikorksy would later use that machine to develop the main rotor/tail rotor configuration used by most helicopters today. It’s at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, now. The fuselage was later covered with linen (as was common for small aircraft at the time), but in early development he left it uncovered to make modifications easier.
Comment by Orv — October 23, 2007 @ 8:58 pm
Hanna Reitsch flew a helicopter way back erlier than the Americans In Berlin, in the Deutschlandhalle February 1938 she flew INSIDE the hall
Comment by Jan Bout — April 13, 2008 @ 1:52 pm