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sink-me
Helicopter Joins Army as Courier, Ambulance
Adopted by the Army Air Forces after nearly a year of experiments, the Sikorsky
helicopter has been placed in production and will be tried out in the field as a
courier and rescue craft. The army model is the first two-seat helicopter built,
accommodating pilot and passenger or crew member side by side. Its ability to land
in an area no larger than that described by its big main rotor, and to take off
vertically without a runway, makes it ideal as a liaison and message carrier at
the front. Any clearing about 40 feet in diameter will accommodate the ship. With
low-pressure floats it could operate from land, water, snow, marsh or thin ice.
If landing is impossible, a telephone line dropped from the helicopter to a headquarters
post on a mountain top or in a dense forest would permit personal delivery of messages.
Equipped as an aerial ambulance it could bring injured men out of a jungle or inaccessible
area - and there have been recent instances where victims of bomber crashes could
have been rescued by helicopter in hours rather than the days required to reach
them by pack train. The army points out, too, the possibilities opened up by the
ability of the helicopter to alight on a ship's deck. The Army-Sikorsky helicopter
is a simplified and improved model of the single-place craft which Igor Sikorsky
first demonstrated in 1940. Like its prototype, it can rise or descend vertically,
hover, move forward, backward or sidewise, or spin like a top, and in case of motor
failure can windmill down safely. Its main three-bladed rotor of 36 feet diameter
operates above the fuselage; a 7 1/2-foot rotor in a vertical plane at one side
of the tail is for steering and torque compensation. A seven-cylinder radial engine
drives both rotors by gear and shaft transmission. The helicopter weighs 2,400 pounds
gross, and is about 38 feet long by 12 feet high. In one of its tests at Wright
Field a ladder was let down to the ground while the helicopter hovered motionless
above, and a crew member climbed down, completed an errand on the ground, then climbed
the ladder again to the still waiting craft. In another demonstration the passenger
slid down a rope to the ground from the helicopter while it "parked upstairs."
Top view of first two-seat helicopter shows vertical tail rotor. Left,
the army craft hovers as a parcel is handed up
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