love with aviation at a very early age.” He started build- ing model planes around age six, and he recounts an early memory of the rollout of the legendary Pan Am clipper.
Sergei recalls flying in his father’s lap in the co-pilot seat of a Sikorsky S-38 Amphibian. Visits from some of the greats of early aviation were common in his child- hood, including Charles Lindbergh (Sergei recalls playing with his children), Pan Am founder Juan Tripp, Pan Am’s first head of flight operations André Priester, aviation pio- neer Roscoe Turner, World War I fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker, and Jimmy Doolittle, the American aviator who led the development of instrument flight.
Learning the Ropes In 1909, recognizing the limitations of the technology at the time, Igor abandoned his research on helicopters, concentrating instead on fixed-wing aircraft. Fortunately, he later revisited his research in vertical flight. Sergei recalls one afternoon in 1938 “when my father returned home from a critical meeting with the board of directors of United Aircraft and told us that his helicopter project had been approved.” Visiting the United Aircraft factory in the late 1930s, Sergei became intrigued “by a small little helicopter that was taking shape in the corner of the seaplane hangar.” Sergei worked with Igor, including making small balsa helicopter models and sketches of future helicopters conducting various missions, for his father to show to engineers.
Sergei handled a number of jobs as the pioneering
Sikorsky VS-300 came into service around 1940, includ- ing greasing the main rotor and tail rotor fittings. Bearings in main rotor hubs would shoot grease out, which did not bode well for the parade of visitors to the factory. As Sergei remembers, “When we didn’t like some-
body, we would always say, ‘You don’t have to go back too far. You could stand up pretty close—very moderate rotor downwash.’ And sometimes that person believed it, stood up fairly close when the helicopters took off, and got himself a grease bath. It was not very polite, but at that time we weren’t very polite.” The Sikorskys warned those they liked to stand back at least 50 feet, he says. Sergei stresses that his father was adamant about not being named the inventor of the helicopter. “Whenever he was told that he was the father of the
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helicopter, my father would insist, ‘No, the father of the helicopter is Professor Henrich Focke who built the very first practical machine capable of flying 250 miles, capa- ble of climbing to 11,000 and 12,000 feet of altitude and endurances of 2½ and 3½ hours.’” Igor, he says, “would grudgingly admit to the fact that he solved the challenge over the single main lifting rotor and a small anti-torque rotor, which he made with the VS-300.”
A Detour in Italy Drafted in 1943, Sergei went into the Coast Guard Helicopter Development Unit, a joint US-British unit that trained the first US and British helicopter pilots and mechanics and developed the first helicopter rescue hoists, litters, baskets, and related piloting techniques. His unit was also involved in some early search-and- rescue missions. Such a rich background in the early development of helicopter operations gave Sergei a promising future in aviation. But first, fate had a detour in store. Sergei wanted to go to college on the GI Bill after the war, but with col- leges crowded with his fellow ex-US servicemen, the wait to matriculate was two or three years. “Unexpectedly,” he says, “I received a letter from a squadron mate who was studying in Italy on the GI Bill. The schools were hungry for students paying in dollars;
Igor and Sergei reunite at Coast Guard Air Station Brooklyn at Floyd Bennett Field, where the younger Sikorsky served during World War II.
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