opened a lot of doors. “At the time, the


Soviet Union began to show its aeronautical hardware at the Paris Air Show and Farnborough. I became in demand as an unofficial facilitator- translator,” Sergei says. He recounts meeting the first man in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who showed Sergei his space capsule and “gave me some of the scary stuff about reentry when he was looking at the window, and suddenly, whop, the outmost layer of glass just disappears in a flash and then the second layer disap- pears about 10 seconds later. “And he was lucky the last three layers of glass held but were badly, badly heated in the process. He got down all right, but it was a very interesting interview on how you land a space capsule,” Sergei says. He had no illusions about Russia,


though. “The day that I landed in Moscow, I


knew that I was being followed. When I was in the hotel room, I knew that the phone was bugged and that probably there was a little camera somewhere photo- graphing every single move that I made.” After 24 years traveling “from Iceland to Iran, selling a few helicopters along the way,” Sergei returned to the United States in 1975, around the time the US Army announced that United Aircraft had won the Utility Tactical Transport Aircraft System con- tract for what would become the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter.


Sergei recounts speculating with friends from the company at the time that they might get to build roughly 1,400 US Army Black Hawks and that the US Navy might pick the company for its next antisubmarine helicopter, with “a couple of hundred”


Your one stop shop in Aviation Lighting


maybe 2,000 Black Hawks,” he says.


Sergei is extracted from a raft to a Sikorsky HNS-1 in one of the first demonstrations of the helicopter hoist rescue.


orders from Europe and Asia. “So we were actually speculating that possibly, with a great deal of luck, we would build 1,800,


Sergei says no one in that group could have pre- dicted that more than 4,000 Black Hawks would have been built by now, operating in about 29 coun- tries. He would not be sur- prised to see the company building the helicopter for at least another 25 years, for a total production of around 6,000. “It’s a unique machine


right now. And the interest- ing thing is that, of course,


people are using the Black Hawk in mis- sions that we—and certainly Dad—never expected or never thought about,” he says.


DeVore Aviation Corporation of America


www.devoreaviation.com WINTER 2019 ROTOR 61


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