Igor Sikorsky was twelve years old when he built his first helicopter — a rubber-band-powered model that lifted off from his bedroom floor in Kyiv. He spent the next fifty years making it real. Along the way, he built the world’s first four-engine aircraft, fled a revolution, started over with $600 in his pocket in New York, and invented the machine that has saved more lives than any other aircraft in history.

The Ilya Muromets

Before helicopters, before America, before the revolution — there was the Ilya Muromets. Sikorsky designed and built the S-22 at the Russo-Baltic Wagon Factory in St. Petersburg. It built on his S-21 Russky Vityaz — the world’s first four-engine aircraft — and it was enormous by 1913 standards: enclosed heated cabin, electric lights, a toilet, and a promenade deck where passengers could stand in the open air at altitude. On 12 February 1914, a demonstration flight carried 16 passengers — a world record. During the First World War, the Ilya Muromets became the world’s first strategic bomber. Over 400 combat missions were flown. Only one was ever lost to enemy fire. Sikorsky had, almost accidentally, invented heavy aviation.

$600 and a Dream

The Bolshevik Revolution destroyed everything Sikorsky had built. In March 1919, he arrived in New York with $600 and no contacts. He taught mathematics to fellow Russian emigrants. He gave lectures. He scraped together enough money and enough believers to found Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation in 1923, working out of a chicken farm on Long Island. Sergei Rachmaninoff — the composer — was among his early investors. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Sikorsky built flying boats — the S-42 Clipper for Pan American Airways became the icon of transoceanic air travel. But the helicopter dream never left him.

The VS-300

On 14 September 1939, at the Vought-Sikorsky factory in Stratford, Connecticut, Igor Sikorsky — now fifty years old — strapped himself into the VS-300 and lifted off the ground in a tethered hover. He always insisted on making the first test flight of every new design himself. The VS-300 was crude: an open framework, a single main rotor, a small tail rotor. But it worked. And its configuration — one big rotor on top, one small rotor on the tail — became the standard that 90% of the world’s helicopters still use today. The VS-300 led to the R-4 — the first mass-produced helicopter, which first flew in 1942 and flew the first helicopter combat rescue missions in Burma during World War II. Every medevac, every coast guard rescue, every mountain extraction, every military CSAR mission since traces its lineage to the machine that a Ukrainian immigrant built in a Connecticut factory with money from a Russian composer. Sources: Sikorsky Archives, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Igor Sikorsky Historical Archives, Frank Delear “Igor Sikorsky: His Three Careers in Aviation” (1969)