Built on Bendix’s ruins

Peter Papadakos founded Gyrodyne in 1946 with the assets of the bankrupt Bendix Helicopters, carrying on its work on a coaxial helicopter with two contra-rotating rotors and no tail rotor. Starting at Massapequa and moving to St. James on Long Island in 1951, the company spent the next 24 years on coaxial machines, among them the tiny one-man RON Rotorcycle developed for the US Marine Corps.

Torpedoes without a pilot

The Rotorcycle became the QH-50 DASH, the Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter. The Navy’s FRAM programme was modernising Second World War destroyers that had good sonar but no room for a manned helicopter. DASH could fly 22 miles from the ship under remote control and drop two Mark 44 torpedoes on a submarine. Some 755 were built from 1962 to 1969. But its cheap, unduplicated electronics failed often, and more than half the Navy’s 746 drones were lost at sea.

From rotors to rent

The Navy cancelled DASH in 1969. Fitted with TV cameras, some flew on as artillery spotters off Vietnam; Japan flew 20 until 1977, with far fewer losses, and the US Army used a few at White Sands until 2006. Gyrodyne itself began turning its factory into rental space in 1975, and has been a real-estate company ever since.

מפעלים

• Flowerfield · St. James, New York — Helicopter works from 1951; most of the land taken by Stony Brook University in 2005

אֲנָשִׁים

• Peter J. Papadakos · מייסד

שיאים וראשונות

• First drone helicopter in operational naval service, QH-50 DASH