Jetrader - July/August 2011 - 25

aircraft at the time, the four-engine “Il’ya Muromets,” Somehow Rachmaninoff had come to know that Sikorsky was pursuing his visionary path in deﬁance of many hardships. Thanks to Rachmaninoff’s support, the company managed to rent an old wooden hangar at a corner of Roosevelt Field, where the workers moved the airplane with the help of the local police, who had come to respect the hardworking Russians. A few days later, Igor Sikorsky and his family moved into a rented house in Westbury. As a token of appreciation, Sikorsky asked Rachmaninoff to be the company’s ﬁrst vice president. The composer accepted, adding much to the company’s prestige. Thus was Sikorsky’s career in America launched, and thus began a close friendship. “My father felt very proud,” says Sergei Sikorsky, “when in 1929 he sent Rachmaninoff a check for $5,000 plus interest.” On 25 September 1924, after one more year of tribulations including a crash, the S-29A took off successfully, and with it the Sikorsky Company. Many demonstrations and charter ﬂights followed, but the company made its ﬁrst real proﬁt—$500—by using the airliner to transport, appropriately, two grand pianos from New York City to Washington, D.C. One was delivered to a department store, the other to the wife of President Herbert Hoover.

The Next Generation
By December 1928, Trippe decided to have Sikorsky build a four-engine amphibian that would be the world’s largest and have the range and 38-seat capacity to proﬁtably serve South America. It was nicknamed “Flying Forest” for the number of struts necessary to hold up the wing with the weight of four engines and fuel. Known as the S-40, only three were ordered and built at Sikorsky’s new plant in Stratford, Connecticut, where it had been acquired as a division of United Aircraft Corporation, which had originally been founded in 1928 by William E. Boeing as Boeing Air Transport, Inc.—but that’s another story. Following the S-40, came the S-42 with an increase in range of 1,000 miles more than the S-40, enabling it to serve on the Paciﬁc to Hawaii from San Francisco; only Pan Am operated the ten built. Three S-44s were option ordered by American Export Lines, which had approval from the CAB to operate a transatlantic service after a bruising battle in Washington between it

and Pan Am; AEL was eventually taken over by American Airlines and renamed American Overseas Airlines. In December 1948, Trippe bought out AOA and its fleet of seven Constellations and eight B-377 Stratocruisers for $17,450,000. Sikorsky’s last ﬂying boat was the VS-44 in 1940; AEL never took delivery, and the three built ﬂew for the Navy between New York and Ireland carrying a mixture of military passengers and freight. From then on, the development of the helicopter became the ﬁrm’s principal business. It was Louis Bréguet of France and German Heinrich Focke who designed the first helicopters, with Focke’s machine reaching an altitude of 11,243 feet (3,427 meters) in 1937. However, it was Sikorsky who made the helicopter a practical and commercially successful machine. It was in 1931 that he applied for a patent on using a single lift rotor and a small tail vertical rotor to counter its torque. In 1939 he started work on the VS-300, which originally used a 75 hp (56Kw) Lycoming air-cooled engine, a truck transmission together with a vertical drive to the lift rotor, and a light horizontal shaft to a rear belt-and-pulley arrangement to drive the three tail rotors; the familiar vertical one to change direction and to counter the torque of the lift rotor and two horizontal ones on outriggers on either side of the tail. The two horizontal auxiliary rotors were controlled by the pilot with a stick as in a ﬁxed wing airplane to induce roll when the stick was moved from side to side and pitch to a stick fore and aft movement. Foot pedals connected to the auxiliary vertical rotor. As was his usual practice, Sikorsky made the ﬁrst ﬂight on September 14, wearing his signature fedora hat. It took some time to reduce the excessive vibration, and it wasn’t until 13 May 1940, that the ﬁrst ﬂight free of ground restraints was made. On 6 May 1941, the VS-300 broke the Focke helicopter endurance record by remaining airborne 1 hour, 32 minutes. It wasn’t until 8 December 1941, that after numerous modiﬁcations the machine emerged in the form we know today. The two outrigger auxiliary horizontal tail rotors were gone—pitch and roll were now controlled by full cyclic pitch of the main overhead rotor. The vertical tail rotor was retained for directional control

Shown here standing in front of the skeleton of one of his creations, Igor Sikorsky was already a successful and well-respected member of the aviation industry.

and anti-torque. In the event of a loss of power, the main rotor pitch angle changed automatically to auto rotate like an autogyro for a relatively slow descent to land. The pitch control was also interconnected to the throttle so that constant RPM could be maintained when transiting to horizontal ﬂight from hovering or vertical motion. The pilot could still operate the throttle independently. In January 1942, his ﬁrst military model, the XR-4 with an enclosed cockpit, started ground tests and hops while tethered; four months later it was ﬂown from Connecticut to Wright Field in Ohio, taking ﬁve days. The pilot navigated by road signs and querying surprised motorists. With an Army contract for a larger version, more than 400 were produced by the end of WWII. Sikorsky divorced his ﬁrst wife before ﬂeeing Russia ahead of the revolution, leaving behind a daughter, Tania, who eventually joined her father in the U.S., together with his two sisters. His second marriage, in 1924, was in New York to Elisabeth Semion and they had four sons; the eldest retired in 1992 as vice president of special projects at Sikorsky Aircraft. A Russian Orthodox Christian, Sikorsky was deeply religious and authored two philosophical books which reflected his beliefs: The Message of the Lord’s Prayer and The Invisible Encounter. Sikorsky died on 26 October 1972. He was 83. Jetrader 25

Jetrader - July/August 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Jetrader - July/August 2011