A boardroom coup

Vertol was born in a boardroom. Piasecki Helicopter had made its name with Frank Piasecki’s tandem-rotor flying bananas, but its majority owners, who had taken 51 per cent in 1946, lost faith in his leadership and in his enthusiasm for compound helicopters. When he started a rival company, two special stockholders’ meetings in 1956 renamed the business Vertol, for vertical take-off and landing, and changed the by-laws to bar his re-election. In May 1956 he was out.

The tiltwing and the 107

The new company kept the tandem formula and added turbines. In 1956 it began the Model 107, a turboshaft successor to the HUP; the prototype flew on 22 April 1958 and the US Army ordered production examples that June. Vertol also flew the VZ-2, a tiltwing research aircraft that hovered on 13 August 1957 and made its first full transition from vertical to forward flight on 23 July 1958. It made some 450 flights before the programme ended in 1965 and is preserved by the Smithsonian.

Into Boeing

Two new designs at once proved too much. When the Army asked in March 1959 for a larger version, the V-114, Vertol ran into financial pressure, and Boeing bought it on 30 March 1960. As Boeing Vertol, the company turned the 107 into the CH-46 Sea Knight, 524 of which served the US Navy and Marines until 2015, and the V-114 into the CH-47 Chinook, still in production today.

Fábricas

• Morton plant · Morton, Pennsylvania — Piasecki and Vertol home; Boeing’s rotorcraft centre later moved to nearby Ridley Park

Gente

• Frank Piasecki · founder of the predecessor — Forced out in May 1956
• Don R. Berlin · president from 1953

Récords y primicias

• VZ-2: first full tiltwing transition from vertical to horizontal flight for the type, 23 July 1958