Uncle Igor's Dream

Even his best friends called it "Igor's Nightmare." A clutter of steel tubing and odd gears, topped by a giant three-bladed rotor, the machine looked like the handiwork of an imaginative child playing with an Erector set. Yet its middle-aged creator clearly had confidence in his contraption. Dressed in a dark business suit and a fedora, he climbed easily into the open cockpit and coaxed the 75-h.p. engine to life. As the rotor blades clattered noisily overhead, the machine lifted a few feet off the ground and hovered there for ten full seconds before sinking gently back. Thus, on a field in Stratford, Conn., on the morning of Sept. 14, 1939, Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky added another chapter to aviation history by flying the world's first practical helicopter.

The idea for the helicopter (from the Greek words for spiral and wing) goes back at least a thousand years to the Chinese top, a toy propeller that rises sharply after its shaft is rotated between the palms of the hands. But in spite of the efforts of many inventors, including the Wright brothers, to turn it into a full-sized flying machine, the helicopter did not become a commercial reality until, with persistence and engineering skill, Sikorsky perfected it. Indeed, his interest in his nightmare continued long after his retirement in the late 1950s. Until just before his death last week at the age of 83, "Uncle Igor," as colleagues called him behind his back, came regularly to the Connecticut aircraft plant that still bears his name.

Helpful Mosquito. Born in prerevolutionary Russia, the son of a prominent Kiev physician, Sikorsky decided early in life to make aviation his career. In 1909, at the age of 19, he went to Paris, where he watched Europe's first flyers lurch and sputter across pastures in wire-and-cloth crates. He returned home with a 25-h.p. three-cylinder engine, determined to build a different kind of aircraft that he had first read about as a child in the science fiction of Jules Verne.

Sikorsky's early helicopters never got off the ground. So the young designer-pilot switched to fixed-wing aircraft. His initial efforts in that line were also flops, but one forced landing proved inspirational. When he tried to find out why his engine had conked out, he discovered that a mosquito had been sucked into the carburetor, blocking the flow of gasoline. Convinced that there would be more safety in numbers, he began building the first large multiengine planes. In 1913 he produced the 60-m.p.h. Grand--the first four-engine aircraft. It led to some 70 pioneering multiengine bombers that were successfully used by the Russians against the Germans in World War I.

Sikorsky arrived in the United States with only a few hundred dollars after the Russian Revolution. But by cajoling funds from his fellow exiles, including the composer-pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, he eventually got back into the aviation business. His first American-built plane crashed, largely because the extremely polite and courtly Sikorsky refused to order his workmen off, thereby badly overloading the two-engine craft. Nevertheless, Sikorsky's fledgling company survived the disaster. Soon it was on its way to producing the first of the successful multiengine planes and flying boats that ultimately evolved into the pioneering transatlantic Clipper ships. In 1937 Sikorsky asked skeptical colleagues at United Aircraft Corp. for money to resume helicopter research. Because of his personal reputation, Sikorsky got a go-ahead. It was a wise decision. Within three years, at a cost of less than $300,000, Sikorsky had overcome major difficulties--notably the helicopter's tendency to twist. He resourcefully used a single rotor with a small vertical propeller at the tail instead of the double, opposing rotors that had troubled his predecessors. Explained Sikorsky: "Two women in the kitchen get in each other's way."

Sikorsky's helicopters began to demonstrate military agility as early as World War II. In Korea and Viet Nam, they totally revolutionized airborne tactics. But Sikorsky, who was deeply committed to his Russian Orthodox faith, was far more proud that his helicopters had become an invaluable instrument of peace. To the end of his life, one of his favorite pastimes was to collect newspaper clippings that told of helicopter rescues in such natural disasters as floods and forest fires.

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