The helicopter that would not fly

In the summer of 1909 a 20-year-old student in Kiev bolted two contra-rotating rotors to a 25 hp Anzani engine and tried to make it rise. It could not: the machine produced about 357 lbf of lift and weighed some 457 lb. By October Igor Sikorsky had taken it apart, concluding that the engines, materials and money of the day were simply not up to it. He had caught the bug a year earlier, in Germany, reading about the Wright brothers and Zeppelin’s airships, and later recalled deciding within twenty-four hours to change his life’s work. He turned to aeroplanes instead — and it would be thirty years before he came back to the helicopter.

A railway works and the Tsar’s giants

The aeroplanes worked. His S-5 earned him Russian pilot’s licence No. 64 in 1911, and in 1912 he became chief engineer of the aircraft division of the Russo-Balt railway carriage works in Saint Petersburg — a train factory that was about to build giants. On 13 May 1913 Sikorsky himself flew the S-21 Russky Vityaz, the first successful four-engine aircraft. Its successor, the Ilya Muromets, carried 16 passengers in February 1914 and flew from Saint Petersburg to Kiev and back that summer; in the war that followed it became the world’s first four-engine bomber, pioneering night and group raids. Then came the Revolution. Threatened by the Bolsheviks as the Tsar’s friend, Sikorsky fled in 1918 and reached New York on 30 March 1919.

Rachmaninoff’s cheque

In America the most famous aircraft designer in Russia taught school to get by. On 5 March 1923, with help from former Russian officers, he founded the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation and began building a 14-passenger twin-engined airliner on a farm near Roosevelt Field, Long Island. That winter the money ran out. Then a visitor appeared: the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who wrote a cheque for $5,000 to finish the S-29-A. Its first flight, on 4 May 1924, ended in a golf course. Rebuilt with Liberty engines, it flew again in September, and its first paying job, in April 1925, was hauling two baby grand pianos to Washington, one for the First Lady, Grace Coolidge. Howard Hughes later bought it and painted it as a German Gotha bomber for Hell’s Angels.

Clippers for Pan Am

The S-38 amphibian of 1928 made the company. A hundred and one were built, Pan Am flew them across the Caribbean, and the money paid for a new factory at Stratford, Connecticut, in 1929. That July the firm joined the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, the group that later became United Technologies. Sikorsky now built the great flying boats that opened Pan Am’s ocean routes: the S-40, the S-42 Clipper — whose prototype set ten world payload-to-height records in 1934 — the S-43 Baby Clipper and the VS-44. But sales declined in the late 1930s, and United Aircraft merged the division with Vought. Sikorsky, now fifty, went back to the problem that had beaten him in 1909: the helicopter.

Back to the helicopter, thirty years on

On 14 September 1939 Igor Sikorsky, at the controls himself, lifted the VS-300 off the ground at Stratford on a tether; its first free flight followed on 24 May 1940. It was a frail-looking frame of steel tube, but its layout — one main rotor and a small anti-torque rotor at the tail — became the shape of nearly every helicopter built since. Its military development, the R-4, flew on 14 January 1942 and became the world’s first mass-produced helicopter, 131 of them. On 22–23 April 1944, in the Burmese jungle, Lieutenant Carter Harman of the 1st Air Commando Group used a YR-4B to rescue a downed pilot and three British soldiers, two at a time: the first combat rescue by helicopter.

From Chickasaw to Black Hawk

After the war Stratford turned out helicopters by the thousand: 1,728 S-55s, 2,340 S-58s and more than 1,300 Sea Kings, which plucked several Apollo crews from the sea. Sikorsky machines have carried US presidents since 1957. In 1967 two HH-3E Jolly Green Giants made the first non-stop helicopter crossing of the Atlantic; in 1971 a CH-54 Skycrane set a level-flight altitude record of 11,000 m that still stands. Then, on 17 October 1974, the UH-60 Black Hawk flew. It won the Army’s UTTAS contest in 1976 and became the defining utility helicopter of its age — more than 5,000 delivered to more than 36 countries, with over 15 million flight hours, around 5 million of them in combat, including the stealthy variant used in the 2011 bin Laden raid.

A Lockheed Martin company

Not every bet paid off. The Boeing-Sikorsky Comanche stealth scout was cancelled in 2004 after nearly $7 billion; the Defiant lost the Army’s Black Hawk replacement contest to Bell’s V-280 in December 2022; and the Raider X scout died with the FARA programme in February 2024. In between, the X2 demonstrator passed 225 knots in 2010, unofficially beating the helicopter speed record. United Technologies, owner from 1975, sold Sikorsky to Lockheed Martin for $9.0 billion on 6 November 2015, by which time it had bought Schweizer (2004) and Poland’s PZL Mielec (2007). The company turned 100 in 2023, and on 30 September 2026 signed a new flexible Black Hawk production deal with the Army. Igor Sikorsky, who died in 1972, lies in a Russian Orthodox cemetery in Stratford.

Fabrieken

• Stratford main plant · Stratford, Connecticut — Headquarters and main factory since 1929, with the company heliport
• Roosevelt Field workshop · Long Island, New York — Farm near Roosevelt Field where the S-29-A was built, 1923–1924
• Development Flight Center · West Palm Beach, Florida — Flight test centre since 1977; military completion work moved here in 2012
• PZL Mielec · Mielec, Poland — Bought 2007; assembles the S-70i for export customers
• Coatesville · Coatesville, Pennsylvania — Ex-Keystone Helicopter, bought 2005; home of Sikorsky Global Helicopters until 2022
• Alabama sites · Huntsville and Troy, Alabama
• Hawk Works · Big Flats, New York — Opened 2007, closed 2012 with 570 jobs lost

Mensen

• Igor Sikorsky · founder, designer — Born Kiev 25 May 1889, died Easton, Connecticut, 26 October 1972; National Medal of Science 1967
• Sergei Rachmaninoff · composer, early backer — His $5,000 cheque completed the S-29-A in 1923–1924
• Carter Harman · US Army Air Forces pilot — Flew the first combat helicopter rescue in an R-4, Burma, April 1944
• Sergei Sikorsky · son, company executive — Joined in 1951 and retired in 1992 as vice president of special projects; died 2025
• Roscoe Turner · showman pilot — Bought the S-29-A in 1927 before selling it to Howard Hughes
• Rich Benton · vice president and general manager, Sikorsky — Head of the company in 2026

Records en primeurs

• First successful four-engine aircraft, S-21 Russky Vityaz, 13 May 1913, in Russia before the company existed
• Ilya Muromets: 16 passengers in February 1914 and the Saint Petersburg–Kiev return flight in 1914
• S-42 prototype: ten world payload-to-height records, 1934
• World’s first mass-produced helicopter, R-4, 1942
• First combat rescue by helicopter, YR-4B, Burma, 22–23 April 1944
• First non-stop transatlantic helicopter flight, two USAF HH-3Es, 31 May–1 June 1967
• Helicopter altitude record in level flight, 11,000 m, CH-54 Skycrane, 1971
• X2 exceeded 225 knots on 26 July 2010, unofficially beating the FAI helicopter speed record