Science: Hillercopter11

A 19-year-old inventor may have made aviation history last week. In San Francisco, before an audience of Navy officers and aviation bigwigs, including Grover Loening, head aircraft consultant of WPB, young Stanley Hiller Jr. demonstrated a helicopter of startling maneuverability. He held the machine steady in the air just a foot off the ground, turned it around while hovering, landed the craft within a foot of its take-off point.

The standard Sikorsky helicopter has a rotor on top, for lifting, and another in the tail, for steering and to counteract the twisting effect given the ship by the top rotor. Hiller decided that the tail rotor was all wrong: it added unnecessary weight, wasted power, set up turbulence around the ship. His solution: two rotors on top, mounted on the same shaft but rotating in opposite directions.

Using a new mechanism, a military secret, which controls the pitch and speed of the two rotors (either or both), Killer’s “Hillercopter” is driven and steered by the top rotors alone. Advantages claimed by Hiller: his machine is much easier to pilot, can be parked in a garage by folding the rotor blades, will eventually fly farther and faster, because of its lighter construction, than other helicopters. He said he had already flown his 90-h.p. model at 100 m.p.h.

(top for a model of the same power is about 80).

Steaming Stanley. At 19, slim, black-haired Stanley Hiller is a veteran inventor. An inventor’s son (his father flew a plane of his own design in 1911), Stanley began to tinker with tools at five. At ten he built a toy car which he drove around the streets of Berkeley, Calif.; at twelve he invented a miniature racing auto 19 inches long. Powered by a gas engine and guided by a cable, it sped around a circular course at 107 m.p.h. At 17, as head of his own company, Hiller Industries, Inc., Stanley was running a $100,000 midget racing auto business. He learned to fly when he was so small that he had to sit in his father’s lap to reach the controls. With his father, he invented a machine for casting aluminum; since the war began he has been busy manufacturing cast-aluminum plane parts. Anticipating many postwar uses for this process, Stanley has already designed a cast-aluminum frying pan in which eggs can be cooked without grease.

Stanley began his helicopter experiments three years ago after seeing a movie of

Sikorsky’s machine, which he promptly decided was faulty. Quitting the University of California as a freshman, he built a 100-lb. model, lugged it to the Army’s aviation laboratories at Wright Field. “They said I’d better just go back home and forget the whole thing.” Thereupon he hied himself to Washington, tracked down Grover Loening, wangled priorities to build a full-scale model.

Last week Stanley was scheduled to be inducted into the Navy. But Navymen, after seeing his demonstration, asked for his deferment and commissioned the youngster to start working on a four-passenger Hillercopter.