"...a sweet little ship"

Flight Journal, Oct 2001 by Sikorsky, Sergei I

TAILVIEW

Growing up as the oldest son of aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky was pretty exciting in those golden years just before Pearl Harbor. In the summer of 1941, I took flying lessons at the local airport. My instructor was very insistent about the need to maintain flying speed. "Airspeed is life insurance. Airspeed is what it's all about!" For a teenage student pilot, his word was law.

Across the street, my father was coaxing a strange little machine into the air. His prototype helicopter, the VS-300, had flown brief hops in September 1939, just as VW II started in Europe. Progress was very slow for two reasons, however: little was known about helicopter aerodynamics and stability, and the test pilot (Dad) thought it was a good idea to learn how to fly a helicopter before going too high or too fast.

By then, my father could have rested on his laurels. He was already famous as the designer and test pilot of the first successful multiengine airplane in aviation history-the "Grand" of 1913, made in Russia. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, he immigrated to the United States. In his new homeland, he created a series of record-breaking flying boats, including several generations of Pan American "clipper ships" that established PanAm as leader in transpacific and transatlantic service. His first love, however, was the helicopter. As a student in Russia, he had built two helicopters in 1909 and 1910. Neither one was successful, so in 1910 he "temporarily postponed" further helicopter experiments and turned to designing fixed-wing aircraft. As they say, the rest is history!

The bond between the little helicopter and its creator was real. The VS-300 was, in his words, "... a chance to live one's life again; to conceive a new type of aircraft, to build it without really knowing how it should be done, and then to climb into the cockpit and test-fly the machine without really knowing how to fly it." He never referred to the VS-300 as "it"; for him, the VS-300 was "she." A year later, in 1942, I was working in my father's shop, learning aviation from the ground up. Often, my job was to wipe the helicopter down after a demo flight. She threw grease out of her rotor-head bearings by the ton. At that time, most of the design problems had been resolved; the single-rotor helicopter had proved itself and the bigger prototype XR-4 was being tested prior to being produced for the U.S. Army Air Corps, the Navy and the RAF.

In late 1942, a small cockpit was installed just in front of the main rotor shaft, which was some three feet behind the pilot. The seat was a simple board; the seat belt was attached to the helicopter's frame. I remember my first flight in it with my father in control. We lifted to around three or four feet. We were flying-at zero airspeed! Then we moved at will across the potato field behind the Sikorsky plant-forward, sideways and then backward. We rose higher, and suddenly, I realized that my father had made airspeed irrelevant. It was as simple as that-but wonderful at the same time-to be flying totally independent of airspeed.

I believe it was in the spring of 1943 that my father demonstrated the helicopter to Helen Keller. This magnificent woman, born deaf and blind, had through the years overcome her handicaps. She stood there, as the helicopter hovered in the air next to her. She lifted her face, smiled into the gentle rotor downwash, reached out with her hand and traced the helicopter's canvas skin with her fingertips. Still smiling, she walked alongside the hovering machine, now with both hands gently moving across the fuselage, sensing the helicopter in flight. It was an unforgettable moment.

Father landed, shut down and climbed out of the cockpit. Helen Keller was still smiling. She thanked him for the chance to feel the machine in the air in flight! She said, very softly, "For a moment, I felt that it was alive, and not just a machine." Dad nodded.

In mid-1943, I went to War. The little VS-300 continued to fly; it was used to test a variety of rotor systems and was used for training and evaluation by a small group of select pilots. Among them was D.D. "Jimmy" Viner, who soon became chief test pilot for Sikorsky Aircraft. Another was Charles Lindbergh, a very close friend of our family and technical consultant to [then] United Aircraft, which later became United Technologies.

In October 1943, my father donated the VS-300 to the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, where it is still on display. The helicopter flew for the last time during the presentation; my father lifted it into a hover in front of thousands of spectators, flew a few gentle turns, then landed and shut her down for the last time. For a moment, he sat in the cockpit, head bowed as if recording every detail. He climbed out slowly and was stroking the side of the ship as Henry Ford came up to him. He turned to Ford and said "She was a good ship-a sweet little ship."

I am sure that Helen Keller would have agreed.