Igor Sikorsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Igor Sikorsky built a small rubber band-powered helicopter at age 12, long before the world had any reason to believe such machines could carry a person. That boyhood model, assembled in Kiev in the early 1900s, contained the seed of an obsession that would eventually reshape how humanity moves through the air. What drives a child toward flying machines? And how does a man who twice had to abandon everything he built end up defining an entirely new category of aircraft? Those are the questions at the heart of Sikorsky's story.

• 2. A Boyhood in Kiev

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  Sikorsky was born on the 25th of May 1889 in Kiev, in the Russian Empire, the youngest of five children. His father, Ivan Alexeevich Sikorsky, held the chair of psychology at Saint Vladimir University and carried an international reputation as a psychiatrist. His mother, Mariya Stefanovna Sikorskaya, was a trained physician who chose to educate Igor at home. She introduced him to Leonardo da Vinci and to the novels of Jules Verne, and those two enthusiasms pointed the same direction: flight.

  In 1900, at age eleven, Sikorsky accompanied his father on a trip to Germany. The conversations they shared on that journey turned his curiosity toward natural science, and by the time he was back in Kiev he was already building small flying models. At fourteen he enrolled at the Saint Petersburg Maritime Cadet Corps, a prestigious institution, but he left in 1906 before completing his course. Engineering, not the navy, was his future. He crossed into France to study, then returned to Russia in 1907 to enroll at the Mechanical College of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute.

  The decisive moment came in the summer of 1908. Sikorsky accompanied his father to Germany again, and there he learned what the Wright brothers had accomplished and what Ferdinand von Zeppelin had built with his rigid airships. He later described his reaction without hesitation: "Within twenty-four hours, I decided to change my life's work. I would study aviation."

• 3. First Flights, First Failures

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  With financial backing from his sister Olga, Sikorsky traveled to Paris in 1909 to meet the pioneers of the aviation world and ask them direct questions about aircraft and flying. In May of that year he returned to Russia and began designing his first helicopter. By July he was already testing it. Powered by a 25 hp Anzani engine, the machine used two counter-rotating two-bladed lifting propellers spinning at 160 rpm. It could generate about 357 pounds of lift. The problem was that it weighed approximately 457 pounds. He disassembled it in October 1909, once he determined it had nothing more to teach him.

  A second helicopter followed in early 1910. This one could lift its own weight of 400 pounds, but not an operator sitting on top of it. Sikorsky was candid about why he stopped: the engines, materials, money, and experience available at the time simply were not adequate for what he was trying to do. He set vertical flight aside and turned to fixed-wing aircraft.

  His first airplane, the S-1, used a 15 hp Anzani three-cylinder fan engine in a pusher configuration and never left the ground under its own power. The second, the S-2, was fitted with a 25 hp Anzani engine in a tractor configuration and first flew on the 3rd of June 1910, reaching a height of a few feet. On the 30th of June, after modifications, Sikorsky reached what he recalled as sixty or eighty feet before the aircraft stalled and crashed into a ravine, destroying it completely. He kept building.

• 4. The Mosquito and the Milestone

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  The S-5 was Sikorsky's fifth aircraft and the first of his designs not derived from European models. Flying it, he earned FAI pilot's license number 64, issued by the Imperial Aero Club of Russia in 1911. The license mattered, but a near-disaster mattered more. During a demonstration of the S-5, the engine quit without warning and Sikorsky was forced to crash-land to avoid a wall. The investigation revealed that a mosquito trapped in the gasoline had been drawn into the carburetor, starving the engine of fuel. That single insect changed the direction of his career. From that point forward, Sikorsky was determined to build an aircraft that could continue flying after losing an engine.

  His S-6 carried three passengers and won the Moscow aircraft exhibition organized by the Russian Army in February 1912. The same year, Sikorsky was appointed Chief Engineer of the aircraft division at the Russian Baltic Railroad Car Works in Saint Petersburg, known by its Russian abbreviation R-BVZ. The promotion gave him resources, a factory, and a mandate to think large.

  The machine he built there, the S-21, went through three names as he revised it: Le Grand when it flew with just two engines, then the Bolshoi Baltisky when fitted with four engines in push-pull pairs, and finally the Russky Vityaz in its all-tractor four-engine form. On the 13th of May 1913, Sikorsky himself sat in the pilot's seat for the Russky Vityaz's first flight, making it the first successful four-engine aircraft to fly anywhere in the world. Saint Petersburg Polytechnical Institute awarded him an honorary engineering degree in 1914 in recognition of that achievement.

• 5. War, Revolution, Exodus

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  When World War I broke out, Sikorsky took the design experience from the Russky Vityaz and applied it to the S-22, giving Russia the world's first four-engine bomber. The Ilya Muromets family, designations S-22 through S-27, became a significant military instrument, and Sikorsky was decorated with the Order of St. Vladimir for the work. By the start of the war in 1914, his airplane research and production business in Kiev was flourishing.

  The Russian Revolution in 1917 ended all of it. Sikorsky fled in early 1918 because, as he was warned, the Bolsheviks intended to shoot him for being "the Tsar's friend and a very popular person." He made his way to France, where he was offered a contract to design a more powerful successor to the Muromets-type bomber. In November 1918 the war ended abruptly, the French government stopped funding military orders, and the contract evaporated.

  On the 24th of March 1919, Sikorsky left France aboard the ocean liner Lorraine. He arrived in New York City on the 30th of March 1919. He was twenty-nine years old, had no employer, and was entering a country whose language he barely spoke. His first years in America were spent teaching school and giving lectures while searching for a way back into aviation.

• 6. Building Again in America

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  In 1923, Sikorsky formed the Sikorsky Manufacturing Company in Roosevelt, New York, with help from several former Russian military officers who had also emigrated. The moment that likely saved the company arrived when composer Sergei Rachmaninoff introduced himself by writing a check for five thousand dollars. That sum helped Sikorsky repair a damaged prototype after its first test flight and persuade reluctant backers to invest an additional $2,500.

  The aircraft that resulted from that narrow survival was the S-29, one of the first twin-engine aircraft built in the United States. It held fourteen passengers and flew at 115 mph. Those numbers looked modest against the military aircraft of 1918, and Sikorsky later acknowledged the S-29 represented a "make or break" moment for his funding. The company held together.

  In 1928 Sikorsky became a naturalized American citizen. The following year the company relocated to Stratford, Connecticut, and was absorbed into the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, which later became United Technologies Corporation. From Stratford, Sikorsky designed the flying boats that Pan American Airways needed to bridge the Atlantic. The S-42, known as the Clipper, became the flagship of that effort in 1934.

• 7. The Helicopter Returns

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  While managing a company that built flying boats, Sikorsky never stopped thinking about vertical flight. On the 14th of February 1929, he filed a patent application for a "direct lift" amphibian using compressed air to power a lifting propeller. A second patent application followed on the 27th of June 1931, and patent number 1,994,488 was issued on the 19th of March 1935.

  Those patents were the theoretical foundation. The physical proof came on the 14th of September 1939, when the Vought-Sikorsky VS-300 lifted off on its first tethered flight in Stratford. Eight months later, on the 24th of May 1940, the VS-300 made its first free flight. Sikorsky was at the controls for both. The configuration he settled on, a single main rotor combined with a single antitorque tail rotor at the rear, solved the fundamental problem of uncontrolled rotation that had stopped him in 1909 and 1910. That arrangement now appears on the majority of helicopters in production worldwide.

  The VS-300 was an experimental machine. Sikorsky refined the design into the R-4, which in 1942 became the world's first mass-produced helicopter. Sikorsky was fifty-three years old when that happened, more than four decades after he built his first rubber band model in Kiev.

• 8. Legacy and Later Life

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  Sikorsky died at his home in Easton, Connecticut, on the 26th of October 1972, and is buried at Saint John the Baptist Russian Orthodox Cemetery on Nichols Avenue in Stratford. He was eighty-three years old. Alongside his engineering work, he had written two books on religious and philosophical subjects, The Message of the Lord's Prayer and The Invisible Encounter, both published by Scribner's. A memoir, The Story of the Winged-S, appeared in 1967.

  His daughter Tania, born in Kiev on the 1st of March 1918, was brought to the United States in 1923 by Sikorsky's sisters. She earned a doctorate at Yale University and spent twenty years as a professor of sociology at Sacred Heart University in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His eldest son Sergei joined United Technologies in 1951 and retired in 1992 as Vice-President of Special Projects at Sikorsky Aircraft.

  The honors arrived steadily in his later decades. Sikorsky was inducted into the International Air and Space Hall of Fame in 1966. In 1987 he entered both the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame. In 1990 the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory named a main-belt asteroid, designated 10090 Sikorsky, in his honor. In 2013, Flying magazine ranked him twelfth on its list of the 51 Heroes of Aviation. The airport nearest his old factory in Stratford bears his name, as does the bridge carrying the Merritt Parkway over the Housatonic River beside the Sikorsky corporate headquarters.