Igor Sikorsky in a variant of the VS-300 helicopter. Helicopter maker Sikorsky marked 75 years of modern helicopter flight on Sept ...
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| Igor Sikorsky in a variant of the VS-300 helicopter. |
The VS-300 led to the R-4, which became the world's first mass-produced helicopter in 1942. Sikorsky's final VS-300 rotor configuration, comprising a single main rotor and a single anti torque tail rotor, is the standard helicopter configuration still being used.
The 601 kg Vought Sikorsky-300 helicopter consisted of a welded steel tube frame with an undercarriage of three wheels. A 75-horsepower engine, transmission belts and gears drove the three-blade main rotor and single-blade counterbalanced wooden tail rotor. In flight, the main rotor turned at approximately 255 RPM.
Igor had tried 30 years earlier, in spring 1909, to build a helicopter at his family home in Kiev, Ukraine. His apparatus consisted of a wood and wire-braced frame built around a 25-horsepower engine connected to a transmission of wooden pulleys and belts that drove coaxial shafts topped with two twin-bladed rotors. He tried again in the spring of 1910 with a second design consisting of two new three-bladed rotors, but the craft could barely lift itself off the ground without a pilot.
"The helicopter was always my father's first love," said Igor's son and company ambassador Sergei Sikorsky, who worked as an apprentice mechanic on the VS-300 aircraft. "By the late 1930s, my father wanted to prove that after two aviation careers in Russia before and during World War 1, and in the United States building transoceanic flying boats before the Second World War, that he could design and build a helicopter''
In 1938, Igor made a compelling argument to United Aircraft, now United Technologies Corp. The board of directors gave Igor and his team $30,000 to test his single rotor helicopter.
On September 14, 1939, outside the Stratford, Connecticut, factory, the 50-year-old chief designer and chief test pilot Igor Sikorsky sat in the open VS-300 cockpit wearing his trademark overcoat and fedora, the engine vibrating the aircraft. He pulled up on the collective control lever at his left side. The VS-300 cleared the ground for a few seconds to the height of its short tether ropes. Many more such 'hops' over the ensuing days and weeks proved the aircraft could be controlled. Sikorsky and other pilots then flew different variations of the VS-300 aircraft for a total of 102 hours and 35 minutes into 1943.
The U.S. Army placed America's first helicopter production contract with Sikorsky in 1942 for 131 R-4 helicopters (Sikorsky designation S-47) of different variants. A YR-4A aircraft flew the first ever helicopter rescue mission under combat conditions in Burma in April, 1944.
