Word: igor
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With a vast fleet of Igor Sikorsky's newly perfected helicopters, Northeast planned to blanket New England from Manhattan to Fort Kent, Me., with a local airmail and express service operated from the rooftops of post offices and railroad stations in 400 cities and hamlets. Because the helicopter can fly straight up, straight down, backward, forward, horizontally, remain stationary in the air, and be brought to an immediate stop, any flat roof surface no larger than 9 by 12 ft. could serve as an adequate air station. Northeast would connect New England towns by direct helicopter service with main...
...designer, onetime big-plane builder Igor Sikorsky, knew that fellow airmen no longer regarded the helicopter as a product of aviation's lunatic fringe. This week his craft got formal recognition, when the Army Air Forces (which had tested it at Dayton) announced that it had ordered some helicopters for military...
...Army, for obvious reasons, did not tell just how far its interest in the helicopter went. But Igor Sikorsky knew, and what he knew seemed to satisfy him. He had seen an airman's dream come true: the helicopter* (which irreverent Sikorsky disciples, in mock-Russian accent, call the helicopéter) could now do more than take off straight up in the air, land straight down and hover motionless. It could also carry a respectable load (two passengers), enough gasoline to make cross-country flights...
...tail propellers were reduced to one, a seven-cylinder Warner radial engine was installed, the body was decently covered, slicked with windshield and windows. In tests, the Army found that it would do all that Igor Sikorsky had promised and more. It can hover so steadily that once an army man let down a ladder, got out on the ground, got back and pulled the ladder in after him before the pilot sent his craft aloft again...
...opera houses. The league's audiences sometimes hissed; music critics usually snorted. But not all of the league's musical bombshells were duds. It introduced U.S. listeners to the phenomenal Russian talents of Serge Prokofieff and Dmitri Shostakovich. It gave the U.S. ballet première of Igor Stravinsky's brilliant Le Sacre du Printemps...