Vietnam War Pacific Stars and Stripes

Pacific Stars and Stripes information

For date 680128

South Vietnam
Description: The following is an edited version of an article titled "A dream and $.80 - and chopper born." The father of the helicopter ate on $.80 a day while dreaming a "crazy" dream of a plane without wings that would lift straight up and over like a hummingbird. President Johnson recently awarded the National Medal of Science for 1967 to the Russian-born genius who once thought beans one of America's major inventions. Igor Ivan Sikorsky was 18 when he built what he hoped would be a flying machine. It wouldn't fly. Still, that was a beginning for the Russian-born youth who had his head in the skies and his heart set on conquering them. Today, at 78, Sikorsky is an acknowledged pioneer in three fields of aviation development - multiengined planes, long-range flying boats and helicopters. The copter is his first love, though it came last. Still actively employed as a consulting engineer of the Sikorsky Aircraft Division of the United Aircraft Corp., Stratford, Conn., Sikorsky received one of aviation's most coveted awards - the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy-at the annual Wright Brothers memorial dinner in Washington, D.C., in December. The trophy, a miniature silver replica of the original Wright plan that flew at Kitty Hawk Dec. 17, 1903, was presented to Sikorsky in recognition of his nearly 60 years in the field of manned flight. That first unsuccessful flight attempt was a disappointment to Igor, of course, but it served to trigger him to renewed efforts. In the years that followed he made the disbelievers believe that four-engine transports and bombers were the new breed of aircraft; that flying boats could cross oceans to provide a new link in international commerce and that the helicopter could fly despite what its critics claimed. For Sikorsky, the real moment of triumph must have come long years after he had begun to design and guild aircraft. It was Sept. 14, 1939, when Sikorsky's VS-300 was the forerunner of a whole family of rotor-powered aircraft designed and built by Sikorsky, climaxed by his development of the crane-equipped helicopter and large amphibious turbocopter. Sikorsky was only in his early 20s when he developed planes that flew- some for the Russians in World War I. He had amassed a fortune by the time he was 28, but lost the equivalent of a half-million U.S. dollars in Russian government investments. The young aeronautics engineer disliked Bolshevism. The 1917 revolution seemed to cast him adrift in his native land. So he fled the country where he had been born May 25, 1889, at Kiev, and came to New York. In September, 1912 the Russian Baltic Car Factory finally agreed to go partners with him to build a four-engine craft. "The job I had at first was a difficult job," he recalled in a recent interview. "There were no materials at that time. There were no wheels available for an airplane of this size; there were no such things as the high steel wires, so I had to improvise, using high steel wires from a piano factory. . . . "But, briefly, the big airplane was built in spite of the doubts expressed by a great many observers. Most predicted failure. The ship was built. It made the first successful flight May 13, 1913, and it was the first successful four-engine airplane in the world. "For the next year and a half I happened to be the only pilot to fly a four-engine airplane, until I checked out a few officers in late 1914 when the war started and the imperial Russian government started to order these ships. Later they were ordered in substantially large quantities and were the first heavy bombing planes used by any country in this great conflict. . . " But the money from this successful venture melted away and Sikorsky reached New York with only $600.He could say "yes" and "no" in English but that was about all. Jobs were scarce. The U.S. postwar aviation industry was on the wane. "I ate on 80 cents a day," he remembers. "I had no meat. Beans were my staple. I consider baked beans one of my adopted country's major inventions." By 1922 he had given up all hope of being hired as an aeronautics engineer. Desperate, Sikorsky appealed to friends, among them Serge Rachmaninoff, the famed Russian pianist-composer, for financial aid, then set up a shed on Long Island and called it the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corp. His first two-engine plane was under--powered. It crashed. But he boasted the power and turned out the first two-engine plane which would fly on one engine. That brought enough contracts to keep the company going and by 1928 Sikorsky produced an amphibian which wrote a dramatic chapter in flying history. The orders came flooding in. He moved the plant to Connecticut and ultimately it became a subsidiary of the United Aircraft Corp. Sikorsky then wanted to build a trans-oceanic transport and got a big break in this direction when Pan American Airways gave him an order. He met Col. Charles A. Lindbergh, a friendship developed and details of the original "flying clipper" were drawn roughly while the two were dining in 1931 at a Cuban hotel. The immediate result was the "Yankee Clipper," first of a series of Sikorsky flying boats. The S-42 which finally emerged surveyed the San Francisco-Manila and San Francisco-New Zealand air routes.Later it was used on North Atlantic airways. The S-42 was powered by four Wasp engines developing 2,000 horsepower, had a maximum speed of 180 miles an hour and a cruise speed of 160 miles an hour.Recalling the S-42, Sikorsky says: "The ship fully confirmed the hopes which we had given it. It was capable of flying across the Atlantic Ocean or any other ocean. It had the lifting capacity, had the range and the cruising speed on the order of some 160 miles an hour, which at that time was a high speed...." That was the beginning of the clipper service which became an aviation byword all over the world and led to the military version of the flying boat used so widely for years by the U.S. Navy and still, in fact, flying rescue patrols. His first helicopter - the VS-300-was the first successful direct-lift aircraft produced in the United States and the 1939 forerunner of an entire family of "whirlybirds." Grandads of the family are the crane-equipped copter and the powerful amphibious turbocopter. All the time he was designing and building multiengined airplanes and ocean-spanning flying boats, in STratford, Conn., the Russian-born Sikorsky concedes "I certainly was thinking about the first love (the helicopter)." As early as 1926 and later in 1930, he recalls in a recent interview, Sikorsky made sketches of an aircraft "very, very similar to the VS-300 which eventually was constructed." But there was no time for helicopter development while the multiengined and amphibian transports were taking shape. "The helicopter was at that time (in the 1930's) one of the impossible, "Sikorsky recalls. "Many people considered that no helicopter with good, real control characteristics could and would ever be constructed. "Other pessimists said that even if you did construct a helicopter, no one would need this helicopter." But Sikorsky insisted, despite his detractors, that the copter would be able to achieve missions that no airplane could accomplish. Airplanes can fly anywhere, but they need an airport, Sikorsky notes. "If there is no airport, no flying field, the airplane is obviously helpless and powerless, completely," he observes. "If a man is in need, well, the airplane can come in and throw flowers on him, and that's just about all. "A direct-lift airplane could come in and save his life. Direct-lift aircraft can go anywhere, anytime, where there is air, and this commodity is fairly widespread over our wonderful globe. Even if the helicopter cannot land, and these were the ideas which I had fully before I started it, the helicopter could use a hoist, or a cable and contact any place on the ground, a roof, on water, on a treetop, absolutely anyplace. "The helicopter is the only thing which can do that," Sikorsky declares. While Sikorsky has confined most of his long career to aviation his interest has spilled over as well into space and interplanetary travel. "It is my belief," he says, "that no intelligent life exists anywhere in the solar system except on the earth. A global war which could "ruin our civilization" would delay adventures in space, Sikorsky says. "It was some scientist," he recalls, "I don't know if it was Einstein or someone else, who when asked what weapons would be used in World War III said "I don't know." But he added in World War IV they will be using clubs and rocks. So this shows the nature of World War III, which I hope we will somehow avoid." Photo Captions At 78, Igor Ivan Sikorsky is looking ahead to greater copter improvements. The Sikorsky S-62 is the first helicopter built with a flying boat-type hull suitable for operating from water. With its designer and builder, Igor Sikorsky, at the controls, the VS-300 was the first successful direct-lift aircraft produced in the Western Hemisphere. The copter, which established an American helicopter endurance record of 1 hour, 5 minutes , 14.5 seconds, during the flight above, was powered by a 75-hp, Lycoming engine. The first fledgling flight of the Sikorsky model was on Sept. 14, 1939. A universal military pod, produced by Sikorsky Aircraft, fits snugly beneaththe skeletal fuselage of the CH-54A helicopter (above). At right, is an interior shot of the universal pod showing seating arrangements accommodating 45 troops. At left, the Flying Crane brings in a damaged Caribou from Vietnam's Central Highlands.
Comments: CIV Sikorsky, Igor Ivan; helicopter inventory; ;

The source for this information was 6801pss.avn supplied by Les Hines

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Last updated 02/21/2000

Date posted on this site: 05/13/2023