Sikorsky and the Helicopter
Near Bridgeport Stamford, Connecticut
On a September morning in nineteen thirty-nine, a Russian-born engineer named Igor Sikorsky climbed into a strange machine on the grounds of the Vought-Sikorsky plant in Stratford, Connecticut. The machine had a single large rotor overhead and a smaller rotor on its tail. It was tethered to the ground by cables, because nobody was entirely sure what it was going to do. Then it lifted. It hovered. It came back down. The modern helicopter had just flown for the first time.
Igor Sikorsky had been trying to build a helicopter for most of his adult life. He had first attempted it in Kiev in nineteen oh nine, when he was twenty years old, but the technology of the era did not support what he was imagining. He spent the following three decades building fixed-wing aircraft of increasing ambition: in nineteen thirteen he designed the first successful four-engine airplane; by the nineteen thirties he was building flying boats for Pan American Airways. But he never abandoned the helicopter idea. He moved to Stratford in nineteen twenty-nine when his company merged with Vought, and he used the Connecticut location to finally build what he had been designing in his head since Kiev.
The machine he flew that September morning was the VS-three hundred. It took another year to make the first free flight without tether cables, and several more to develop the design into something practical. By nineteen forty-two, the Sikorsky R-four had become the world's first mass-produced helicopter, used by the military in World War Two for search and rescue missions.
The Sikorsky plant in Stratford continued producing helicopters for decades, including the Black Hawk, and the facility became one of the most important aviation manufacturing sites in American history. Sikorsky Memorial Airport, across the Housatonic River, was named for him. He died in nineteen seventy-two, at the age of eighty-three, at his home in Easton, Connecticut, having spent more than sixty years turning a teenage obsession into a technology that now pulls people off mountains and out of floodwaters around the world.
