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Aviation History
1958
1958 - 0363.PDF
379 FLIGHT, 21 March 1958 U.S. Marine Sikorsky HRS helicopters return in formation to their base at Oppaman, Japan. Who Believes in Helicopters? By JOHN W. R. TAYLOR "About four weeks ago, Northeast Airlines filed with the Civil Aeronautics Board an application to open helicopter lines to aug- ment present air-mail operations in six New England states and New York. Later on, the company hopes to set up helicopter passenger schedules . . . ." LEST New York Airways be alarmed at the prospect of suchlarge-scale competition, it may be as well to point out thatJ the above news item appeared in Collier's magazine nearly 15 years ago, when the Press in America first recognized the development potential of Igor Sikorsky's pioneer VS-300 heli- copter. Northeast Airlines, no doubt, lost much of their enthu- siasm after studying the operating costs of production types. In this they are not alone. As recently as July 1954 Air. PeterMasefield, then chief executive of B.E.A., told readers of The Sunday Times that by 1958 there should be "30-passenger twin-engine helicopters beginning to fly between London and Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Manchester and Birmingham at 110 m.p.h."His predicted time-scale shows every sign of being optimistic by about 100 per cent, and he has since felt compelled to commentthat "the available helicopters resemble a pretty girl—they are small, nice to look at and to be seen about with, exciting, pleasantto take out, apt to be noisy; and the more you have to do with them the more expensive they get and the more problems they bringaround your neck." Even the military helicopter seems to have fallen well behindschedule, because die U.S. Army still has far too few to replace trucks completely for work in forward battle areas, although thiswas reported to be its plan after the Korean War. It is easy, therefore, to feel depressed and disappointed withhelicopter progress, without realizing that much of the blame must be laid on those journalists and enthusiasts who expected too muchtoo quickly. If we start to unearth the facts, it becomes apparent that in its short career the helicopter has really done quite well. Unlike the fixed-wing aeroplane, it has achieved its most spec-tacular successes on missions to save life rather than to destroy it. Helicopters in Korea evacuated more than 22,000 casualties fromfront-line positions and helped to reduce to an all-time low the percentage of men who died from their wounds. This was noisolated operation in unique circumstances, for rotating-wing air- craft have kept up comparable good work ever since. Sometimesa single critically injured person has been snatched from death high on a mountainside, deep in the jungle, or from a ledge on atall building. Sometimes ten or twenty have been lifted from a sinking ship. Occasionally hundreds have been hauled to safetyin a day or two, as when Hurricane Diane flooded Connecticut in August 1955 and caused the greatest disaster in the history of thatState. These are examples of work that only a helicopter can do; noother vehicle shares its ability to go virtually anywhere, regardless of terrain, and to lift a person or object from the ground whilsthovering when there is not even a toehold for its multiphibious landing gear. There are other jobs that a helicopter can do more quickly, ormore economically, than conventional vehicles. It can spray crops with insecticide without (as ground implements may do) tramplingdown a proportion of the plants, destroy a swarm of locusts speedily enough to save a primitive village from starvation, lifta radar scanner to the top of a tower when no other suitable tackle is available, or hoist materials for a dam on some inaccessible site. Such achievements are fine and worthwhile. But how often aremen injured on tall buildings? How many radar scanners cannot be put in place by ordinary lifting gear? How many dams arebuilt in areas without roads or railways? In short, the exploits that have earned the greatest publicityare seldom of the type that would keep a large fleet of aircraft busy on a year-round basis. On the other hand, they are far fromnegligible, because some 400 helicopters are employed on charter work by about 80 companies in the United States alone. Butoperations of this kind will never be sufficient to keep the manu- facturers in business, and there will be no real future for thehelicopter unless it first enters service on a much wider scale with the armed forces and airlines. These are the only customers whocan afford to underwrite high development-costs, and their com- paratively small investment and interest in helicopters at thepresent time is the most ominous portent for the future.
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