For All Purposes

Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs last week went up in the air to fight crime on the ground. Cruising 20 hours a day in helicopters above the city of Lakewood (pop. 67,000), near Long Beach, the officers kept a particular watch for an ingenious new type of alarm beacon mounted atop homes and stores. The 1,000-watt beacons, visible five miles in daylight and twelve at night, light up either manually or automatically to signal break-ins or holdups. Within 21 minutes at most, the sheriff's men expect to swoop down on the scene, spot suspects with powerful floodlights, direct approaching earth-bound cops or, if necessary, land to give assistance.

Sardines & Church Steeples. The aerial patrol symbolizes the proliferating use of helicopters (see following color pages). The machines remain costly to buy (minimum: $23,750) and tricky to fly, but coptermakers at last have overcome most of the bugs that for 25 years gave their industry more promise than progress. Rotor craft have not only changed the whole nature of the Viet Nam war but now stand on the threshold of a huge market at home.

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, so he can whisk above the perpetual traffic snarls to fires, crashes--and his city hall office.

Though the number of helicopters in commercial use has climbed from 936 in 1960 to 2,390 today, the main lift in the industry's fortunes has come from Viet Nam. The Defense Department last year took 80% of the $875 million output of the seven major producers: Textron's Bell Helicopter, Boeing-Vertol, United Aircraft's Sikorsky Division, Kaman, Hughes Tool, Fairchild-Hiller and Brantly, which was acquired last week by Lear Jet Corp. This year the Pentagon will spend $1.3 billion for 3,156 choppers, absorb 90% of U.S. production.

Out of the Paddies. Considering the exploits of the 1,800 copters already in Viet Nam, it is no wonder. Such choppers as Bell's ubiquitous UH-1B Huey and Vertol's 44-passenger Chinook are able not only to harry the elusive enemy with rocket and strafing attacks but to carry foot soldiers into battle at 150 m.p.h., eliminating bone-wearying marches through flooded paddies and jungles. Four $2,000,000 Sikorsky CH54A Skycranes, which look gawky but can haul 87 men or a field hospital under their bellies, have so far retrieved 100 downed aircraft--$37 million worth--to fly and fight again.

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 the whole craft in effect a gyroscope resisting any movement from its original position. To keep copters from toppling over like drunken ducks, manufacturers hinged the rotor blades, killed the gyroscope effect with a cumbersome complex of knuckles and joints so as to free the rotor from its housing. This month Hughes Tool will begin delivering its turbine-powered Army OH-6A light observation helicopter, which does away with the heavy knuckles. Even more sophisticated models are on the way. Bell's armor-plated AH-1G next year will give the Army its first helicopter designed as an aerial artillery platform. Hughes, aiming at a future 110-passenger intercity transport, built its experimental XV-9A hot-cycle model, which is powered by hot gases shooting out of rotor-tip vents. Beyond that come bizarre crossbreeds intended to graft the convenience of helicopters to the greater speed and durability of conventional planes. Ling-Temco-Vought's tilt-wing XC-142A can fly straight up, backward at 35 m.p.h. or forward at 400 m.p.h. Lockheed, a relative newcomer to the field, is building an odd-looking hybrid called the AAFSS (for Advanced Aerial Fire Support System) with stubby wings, a pusher propeller and rotor blades to give the Army more close-support firepower than the AH-1G. Another version, still experimental, would take off like a helicopter, fold its rotors in midair, fly on at 500 m.p.h. with normal jet engines.

The Green-Pea Run. Manufacturers, of course, are as delighted as the Pentagon with the improving technology of military helicopters. This year Fairchild-Hiller, Bell and Hughes will bring out utility and executive models based on military designs. Sikorsky sees a big civilian market for its Skycranes, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development has just put up $490,000 to test whether the Crane can fly a buslike pod of 40 passengers between airports and downtown--at costs competitive with ground travel.

And then there is always the potential customer like Miss Alice Wiesendanger, 64, who regularly pilots her Hughes 300 from her home at Saratoga, near San Francisco, to her topaz and tourmaline mine 450 miles south, near San Diego. A food fancier, Miss Wiesendanger yens for the fresh green peas to be found around Half Moon Bay, 30 miles from her home. But she hops over to her favorite vegetable stand--and returns with the peas in less time than it takes to shell them.

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