ARCHER AVIATION PHOTO
solutions by aircraft designers and engineers—led to the rotorcraft industry’s birth with Igor Sikorsky’s development in 1939–41 of the first practical helicopter, the VS-300. In both eras, engineers and entrepreneurs aimed to advance
the state of the art in vertical flight. But their tasks were distinctly different. Sikorsky and his colleagues were working out the essential issues of lift and control in rotorcraft. Today’s eVTOL teams are focused largely on building new aircraft power systems that will use multiple small rotors, each with its own motor, and advanced avionics to manage them as lifting devices and flight controls.
Powering Lift A century ago, the task for the pioneers in rotorcraft was less complicated but completely fundamental to vertical aviation: figuring out how to lift and control their aircraft. Engine choice, while critical, was limited in the early 1900s
to what was available from the automobile and early airplane markets. “Tere was no useful, analytical engineering base” on performance and stability, aeronautical engineer Eugene Liberatore wrote in his 1998 classic, Helicopters Before Helicopters. (It was based on the 18-volume Rotary Wing Handbooks and History that he edited in the 1950s for the US Air Force.)
Before beginning his first helicopter design effort in Russia in 1909, Sikorsky visited Paris, then aviation’s epicenter. He sought to learn from experts and to find an engine. He returned with knowledge and a 25-hp. (18.6-kW) aircraft engine built by Alessandro Anzani. While that model would power Louis Blériot’s first airplane flight across the English Channel on Jul. 25, 1909, the Anzani could not lift Sikorsky’s H-1, a basic coaxial-rotor helicopter, off the ground that year in Kiev, which at that time was part of Russia. It could lift his H-2, tested in 1910, but not both craft and pilot. “Less bad than the rest” was how Sikorsky is said to have described his first engine choice.
Working the Problem of Vertical Flight Inventors’ struggles “to give the helicopter a place” in world transportation have well-documented histories going back more than 250 years, as Franklin Harris summarized in NASA’s 2012 Introduction to Autogyros, Helicopters, and Other V/STOL Aircraft. Two and a half centuries ago or so, there were several attempts with small coaxial aircraft in Russia, France, and England. Experimentation accelerated through the 1800s. Almost all used coaxial designs to address torque reaction and dissimilar lift in forward flight. All that testing was done with models, according to John Fay, a 1950s
More than 80 years after Sikorsky’s first free flight in the VS-300 (opposite), vertical aviation continues to evolve as electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) initiatives promise production of innovative multirotor aircraft capable of transporting passengers and cargo.
ENJOY
this vintage footage of various Sikorsky helicopters in action
DECEMBER 2022 ROTOR 41
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