Science: Vertical Flight

Big drawback of the airplane for private use is that it must have broad, obstacle-free fields for take-offs and landings. To compete with the automobile, air transport needs a machine that takes off straight up, lands straight down, remains under control at any speed or no speed. Beginning with Leonardo da Vinci, air designers have tinkered with vertical-lift machines. They wound up definitely nowhere until famed German Designer Heinrich Focke built a practical helicopter that is said to be working with German troops.*

Another famed modern helicopter man is a shy, voluble, fringe-haired Russian, Igor Sikorsky (now a U. S. citizen). By 1910 he had made his third vertical-lift machine, found that it would lift itself but balked at carrying a load. Like many another helicopterphile, Igor Sikorsky soon sideslipped into airplane design. Last week, having completed the design of a new four-motored ocean clipper for American Export Airlines, Igor Sikorsky made his first public flight in a helicopter, 20 years after his earlier contraption had balked.

After work and on Sundays, Sikorsky & helpers had puttered for months over a strange, spindle-shanked machine in a corner of United Aircraft Corp.’s Vought-Sikorsky plant, across the road from the municipal airport at Bridgeport, Conn. Last week overalled mechanics trundled it on the field and a crowd gawked at its three-bladed, 14-foot overhead rotor (propeller), its spraddle-legged landing gear, its conventional airplane controls. Into the pilot’s seat crawled Designer Sikorsky. The 75-h.p. engine back of the seat of his pants began to buzz, the rotor began to whirl. Three tiny propellers in an outrigger tail, used for stabilizer, rudder and elevators, whistled into shimmering discs.

Down over his balding head Igor Sikorsky pulled his too-small hat. With his right hand on the control stick, his feet on the rudder pedals, he grasped with his left hand the lever that controls the lift of the motor by varying the pitch of the blades. Mechanics (who had held the helicopter with ropes while Designer Sikorsky learned to fly it) backed away. He pulled back the pitch control lever. Into the air jumped Sikorsky’s bug. Fifteen to 20 feet off the ground it came to a stop, hung there. Sikorsky moved the control stick forward, and down the field for about 200 ft. flew the helicopter. It stopped in the air, backed up a few feet, stopped again. Sikorsky looked over the side, chose the spot he wanted to hit, set the ship down, picked it up about a foot, set it down again.

Later, sitting under the stilled rotor on Bridgeport’s field, he explained his controls. For forward flight, he pushes the ship’s nose down, lets gravity pull it toward the ground while the rotor pulls it into the air. The component of the forces of lift and gravity is the line of flight—which can be backward, forward or side-wise—much as a man can move forward by inclining his body and just barely prevent himself from falling by putting his feet in front of him in time.

Satisfied that he had the answer to vertical-lift flight, Igor Sikorsky was also satisfied that he needed only a new engine to make his machine gohigh in the air, travel long distances at better than 100 miles an hour. Already under way in the Vought-Sikorsky plant is a new helicopter with a 200-h.p. engine.

Sikorsky thinks a helicopter could be used in the Air Corps for carrying messages, getting in and out of garden patches, roads, backyards. Armed with a cannon it could be used for defense of battleships, ground establishments, would have a good chance of protecting itself against pursuit planes by stopping dead in the air, backing, hopping straight up to higher altitudes to get out of machine-gun fire.

* The late Juan de la Cierva Jr.’s autogiro used helicopter principles in achieving steep take-offs and landings, but is no true helicopter.