SIKORSKY ARCHIVES PHOTO
and ’60s Westland Aircraft test pilot. “Given the minimum knowledge of how a propeller worked
and some form of power… it was not difficult to design a model lifting device,” Fay wrote in Te Helicopter: History, Piloting & How It Flies, his 1976 book. “It was a much more complex exercise, however,” to design an aircraft capable of taking off, hovering, and moving forward under control while carrying a human. In Germany, Nikolaus Otto’s 1876 invention of the four-
The first phase of the VS-300 program
included developing this simulator with
three rotors all driven by a 5-hp. (3.7-kW) electric motor.
Shown left to right
are Igor Sikorsky and development project members Michael Buivid, Bob
Labensky, and Michael Gluhareff.
stroke internal combustion engine created the possibility of power-to-weight ratios sufficient to carry helicopters and their pilots aloft, Fay noted. “But before helicopter flight became a practical reality, there were the mysteries of trans- lational flight and stability to be solved.” Te reliance entirely on test models waned in 1907. Brothers
Louis and Jacques Bréguet—guided by scientist Charles Richet—built and flew their first gyroplane in a tethered flight south of Lille, in northern France. It rose about 2 ft. (0.6 m). Te pilot’s only control was an engine throttle. Also in 1907, in Lisieux, France, Paul Cornu built a
twin-rotor helicopter with control vanes below the blades. Te rotors were powered by a 24-hp. (18-kW) Antoinette engine built by French engineer Léon Levavasseur. A frame mounted on four bicycle wheels held the machinery. On Nov. 13, 1907, Cornu straddled the frame just behind the engine and ran it and the 20-ft.-diameter (6-m-diameter) rotors up. Te helicopter lifted slightly off the ground for about 20 seconds, with no tethers or ground-crew support. Cornu is credited by, among others, world’s record keeper
Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, with being the first person to pilot a helicopter in free flight. Some question whether his craft actually flew, saying flight would have required at least a 40-hp. (30-kW) engine. Regardless, Cornu would go on to conduct 15 piloted flights, according to Liberatore. Te significance of Cornu, who died in the 1944 Allied
forces bombing of Nazi-occupied Lisieux, lies “in his sys- tematic and scientific attempts to understand the relationship between rotor thrust and power requirements,” according
42 ROTOR DECEMBER 2022
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