Word: rotors
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...Rotor-lifted aircraft, able to take off and land from rooftops, parks or squares in the heart of the biggest cities, are already eliminating that most exasperating aspect of fixed-wing air transport, the long surface trip to outlying airports. The Belgian airline, Sabena, is operating a helicopter service between Brussels, Bonn, Lille, Maastricht and Rotterdam. Helicopter services are carrying passengers and mail in and around New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. City councils all over the U.S. have accepted the theory that the helicopter will not only replace the DC-3 on air feeder lines but may augment...
...performed with low-flying, fixed-wing aircraft, is as safe as surrey-riding when done with helicopters. The owner of a big Texas pecan grove no longer sends Mexican laborers clambering into his trees?he simply flies a helicopter over the grove when the nuts get ripe, and the rotor blows the crop to the ground before lunchtime on harvest day. The whirlybird is proving a heaven-sent device for motion-picture directors; a camera fixed in a helicopter can hang motionless high in the sky over battle scenes, or follow the U.S. Cavalry to the rescue through the steepest...
...more than an aerial curio?a compromise between an airplane and a true helicopter. Conventional-aircraft engineers felt that the long, painful struggle to produce a direct-lift machine was simply proof that the practical helicopter was an impossibility. Sikorsky did not agree. He had never ceased thinking about rotor-machines in all the 30 years since building his first. While workmen at the Sikorsky plant goggled and shook their heads, Sikorsky began flailing the air with a stationary test device made from the transmission of an old Ford, a motorcycle engine, and a single rotor blade...
...frugal; all his years of helicopter research cost United less than $300,000. His Vought-Sikorsky 300 was simply a framework of welded pipes with a 75-h.p. aircraft engine and a big flywheel that was linked by automobile fan belting to the transmission of a single, three-bladed rotor. Nevertheless, it incorporated most of the principles of today's Sikorsky machines...
...building it, the inventor drew heavily on the theories of others, but putting them together mechanically with some of his own and making them practical was an awesome task. Most earlier helicopter builders (like some today) killed torque by using sets of two or more rotors which revolved in opposite directions. But Sikorsky put his faith in one rotor. "One woman in the kitchen is fine," he says. "Two women in the kitchen get in each other's way.'' He decided to keep his fuselage from spinning simply by hanging a vertical fan on an outrigger at the tail...