Igor Sikorsky

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“Creative work… remains a tremendously vital factor in the progress of mankind. The work of the individual still remains the spark which moves mankind ahead.” - Igor Sikorsky Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky was born May 25, 1889, in Kiev, Russia. Igor died October 26, 1972, in Easton, Connecticut. When he died, he left a legacy of creating the first large multi-engined airplane, seaplanes, and best of all, the helicopter. Sikorsky hoped the helicopter might be as common as cars and be used for personal travel. Igor Sikorsky was the first person to invent and fly a helicopter. Igor Sikorsky had a very interesting life. Igor’s mom was a medical school graduate, and his dad was a psychology professor. Sikorsky’s mother was the one who made Igor …show more content…

Igor’s inspiration to build his own helicopter is said to have come from Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch of a helicopter. In 1908, while on vacation in Germany with his father, he saw pictures and read about Wilbur Wright’s European flights and decided to pursue aviation seriously. When Igor was 12, he made a small rubber powered helicopter that could fly at low heights. In 1909, he built his first helicopter, it had a wooden frame and a place for the pilot to sit. While working on his helicopter in 1910, he also built 3 planes and flew 2 of them. Even though both planes crashed, designing the planes gave him the belief that he could create flying machines. Russian composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff, gifted $5,000 to Sikorsky to keep his tiny company going during the early years. Two years after World War II started in Europe, on September 14, 1939, Sikorsky first flew the VS-300 helicopter while it was attached by lines to the ground. Even though Igor hoped the helicopter would be more popular, the skill needed to fly the helicopter made it not so popular.“On May 6, 1941, Sikorsky flew his VS-300 for 1 hour, 32 minutes, and 26 seconds, breaking the previous world record of 1 hour and 20 minutes that the Fa-61 had held since 1937.”-Don Berliner. Igor revealed the VS-300 helicopter to President Henry Ford at the Edison Museum in Michigan on October 7, 1943. When Sikorsky was 21, he had built his first good …show more content…

Sikorsky was the first person to discover that a single rotor put vertically on the tail of the helicopter worked the best. He flew the first successful test flight of the helicopter in the U.S. in 1942. Since it was so complicated to fly a helicopter, it needed many complicated controls. Igor was the first person to design the controls so that the helicopter could fly sideways, backwards, straight up, and hover in one place. When he was young, his most successful design was actually a large 4 engine plane that the military converted to use as a bomber during WWI, and it flew hundreds of successful combat missions. One of Igor’s helicopters, the R-4, was flown by American military forces during WWII and used for the first successful helicopter rescue to save pilots that had crashed behind enemy lines in Burma. In WWII, pilots flew helicopters on missions to gather military information and to rescue soldiers. The main buyers of helicopters today are the military and civilian rescue teams. During his lifetime, he received many medals and awards for aviation, including the U.S. Presidential Certificate of Merit, the Guggenheim Medal and Certificate, and the National Defense Award. Igor thought that the helicopter would be a good use in natural disasters, like fires or floods. Igor guessed that over 50,000 lives were saved because of his helicopters. Helicopters are now very useful for the Air

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