Word: copters
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Construction men now use the whirlybirds to lift church steeples and TV towers, telephone poles and prefab homes. The machines have become the most up-to-date tool for crop dusting, spraying, seeding, fertilizing; on giant ranches, one copter can do the work of 18 cowboys herding cattle. One New Orleans copter taxi operator ferries 180,000 oil workers a year to offshore rigs. The U.S. Forest Service blows out woodland fires with the downdraft from whirling rotors. New York Mayor John Lindsay is having a $3,000 helipad built in the East River beside his official home, Gracie Mansion...
Thanks to swift helicopter evacuation, less than 1% of the U.S.'s wounded in Viet Nam die, as against 10% in the infancy of copter medical aid in Korea. Though copters do get shot down, they have shown surprisingly low vulnerability. Having lost only one per 16,824 sorties, the Army figures that their Viet Nam life expectancy is ten years, considerably more than that of civilian autos at home...
Drunken Ducks. The problems inherent in helicopters make such prowess the more remarkable. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a rudimentary rotor craft in 1483, but even after Russian-born Igor Sikorsky introduced the U.S.'s first successful commercial version 25 years ago, copters remained so cantankerous as to be largely experimental. The indispensable element of a copter is the rotor, which enables it to take off and land on a dime, hover, fly in any direction, land on a dead engine. Spinning, a rotor not only tends to whirl the body of the machine in the opposite direction but makes...
...copter concentration in Alabama is a product of the conflict in South Viet Nam and of the new combat techniques that it has generated. In that war without front lines, holding territory is less important than being able to move over it quickly and at will. Helicopters play a vital, versatile role: they ferry in whole battalions for surprise assaults, carry supplies and reinforcements to the besieged, as in the battle of Plei Me (TIME, Nov. 5), rescue the wounded and the stranded, rake the enemy with fire. And hundreds more are needed. Since President Johnson ordered the massive...
...faculty at Wolters and Rucker consists increasingly of gung-ho Viet Nam veterans who imbue their students with the sense of mission that marks their units in the war zone. "The heli copter has done a great job," one gunship pilot tells his students. "If the chopper hadn't been in Viet Nam, that place would have been long gone by now." The close-cropped heads of warrant officer candidates nod enthusiastically. Says Major General John Tolson, commander of the Army Aviation Center: "They don't seem to find what they want in college. They just want...