Igor Sikorsky

Russian American aerospace engineer

• Born: May 25, 1889
• Birthplace: Kiev, Russia
• Died: October 26, 1972
• Place of death: Easton, Connecticut

Igor Sikorsky made pioneering contributions to the design of aircraft in Russia and then in the United States, designed and flew the world’s first multiengine fixed-wing aircraft, and was instrumental in the development of the helicopter industry.

Primary fields: Aeronautics and aerospace technology; manufacturing

Primary inventions: Helicopter; multiengine fixed-wing aircraft

Early Life

Igor Sikorsky’s (EE-gohr sih-KOHR-skee) father, Ivan Alexis Sikorsky, was a professor of psychology at the University of Kiev, and his mother, Mariya Stefanovna, was a physician who did not practice professionally. The youngest of five children, Sikorsky grew up in Kiev, attended the Russian Naval Academy in St. Petersburg, studied engineering in Paris, and returned to Kiev to enroll in the Polytechnic Institute in 1907. Inspired by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s flights in his first dirigibles in Germany as well as the Wright brothers’ flights at about the same time, Sikorsky returned to Paris, then the aeronautical capital of Europe. His mother had homeschooled Igor, and she developed in him a great love of art, including the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci and the fantastic stories of Jules Verne.

By the age of twelve, Sikorsky had made a small rubber band-powered helicopter, and by twenty he had built his first helicopter, although it never left the ground. Undiscouraged, Sikorsky turned his attention to fixed-wing aircraft; his second design, the S-2, was successful, and later, the S-5 won national recognition when Sikorsky flew it for thirty minutes at seventy miles per hour. The S-6A soon followed, and it won first place at the 1912 Moscow Aviation Exhibition. His success led him to be named head of the aviation division of the Russian Baltic Railroad Car Works, where he designed and built the S-21, “The Grand,” the world’s first successful four-engine plane. Sikorsky was the test pilot for its maiden flight on May 13, 1913. This accomplishment led to the design of an even bigger aircraft, the Ilia Mourometz, and more than seventy versions of this plane were built for use as bombers during the World War I.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 disrupted life in Russia and prompted Sikorsky to leave. He first moved to France, where he began designing bombers for the Allied war effort, but the Armistice that ended World War I was signed soon after he arrived in France. Sikorsky left for the United States, arriving in New York on March 30, 1919.

Life’s work

Sikorsky struggled for several years to gain a foothold in the United States. Finally, on March 23, 1923, the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation was formed in New York, with the help of friends who knew his talents, and Sikorsky began his aviation career all over again. On a chicken farm on Long Island, using spare parts and handmade tools, Sikorsky and his colleagues designed and built the twin-engine, fourteen-passengerS-29A (the A stood for “America”) in 1924. This first prototype was made possible only because of a last-minute contribution of $5,000 from the famous Russian pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. This original S-29A was later sold to Howard Hughes, who used the plane in his early aviation epic, Hell’s Angels, in 1930.

Sikorsky’s first important commercial success was the design of the twin-engine S-38 amphibian plane in 1928. Orders soon rolled in, most notably from Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), which used the plane to open air routes to Central and South America, and the Sikorsky Corporation moved its headquarters to Stratford, Connecticut, and continued production of the S-38. In the same year, the company became a subsidiary and then a division of United Aircraft Corporation (later known as United Technologies Corporation). Its next model was the four-engine S-40 and then the S-42, with engines built by nearby Pratt and Whitney, the “flying boat” used by Pan Am to pioneer transoceanic flights across the Atlantic and the Pacific. The S-44, developed at the end of the 1930’s, was the last fixed-wing aircraft built by Sikorsky.

Having succeeded in careers designing and building aircraft in both Russia and the United States, Sikorsky now returned to his first love, helicopters, which he had tried unsuccessfully to build nearly thirty years before. On September 14, 1939, he piloted his VS-300 a few feet off the ground in a demonstration of the first practical helicopter design. By 1940, the VS-300 (for “Vought-Sikorsky,” a joint venture of two divisions of United Aircraft) had become the first of the single-rotor configuration that would emerge in the future as the world standard in helicopter design. On May 6, 1941, the VS-300 set a world endurance record of over an hour and a half in the air, again with Sikorsky at the controls. Military contracts followed the success of the VS-300, and by 1943 large-scale manufacture of the Sikorsky R-4 made it the world’s first mass-produced helicopter. Thus, the helicopter industry—and the helicopter age—was born.

Sikorsky continued to be a vital part of the company even after his 1957 retirement at the age of sixty-eight, and he was at his desk at the Sikorsky plant, on the Housatonic River at the Merritt Parkway in Stratford, on the day before his death at the age of eighty-three. He was buried not far from the plant, in Easton. A short-lived marriage in Russia had produced a daughter, Tania, and Sikorsky’s marriage to another Russian émigré, Elizabeth Semion, in 1924 produced four sons. Their eldest, Sergei, continued in the aviation field, eventually becoming a vice president at Sikorsky Aircraft.

Sikorsky won numerous awards during his lifetime, and he is enshrined in both the International Aerospace and the Aviation Halls of Fame. In addition to his multiple aviation careers, Sikorsky produced three books. His autobiography, The Story of the Winged-S (1938), chronicled his development as an aircraft designer and builder, and his two religious works, The Message of the Lord’s Prayer (1942) and The Invisible Encounter (1947), revealed his more spiritual side.

Impact

Sikorsky had three almost separate careers, in Russia and the United States, and his impact on aviation history is immeasurable. As a scientist, engineer, pilot, and aircraft manufacturer, he influenced the design and development of both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. In a career spanning more than six decades, Sikorsky designed and flew the first four-engine airliners, developed the airplanes that would open the world to air travel, and drafted the first practical helicopter design and helped to launch the helicopter age in the United States. His accomplishments would change the faces of both war and peace. His designs for bombers altered the way warfare would be conducted from World War I on, his design of transoceanic aircraft opened up the world for travel and business, and his development of the helicopter changed the nature of flight and the pace and speed of modern life.

Sikorsky was awarded more than eighty honors during his lifetime, including the National Medal of Science presented in 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Royal Aeronautical Society of England’s Silver Medal. The achievements of Igor Sikorsky and Sikorsky Aircraft take more than seven pages to list, and they include more than 120 firsts, from the world’s record for flight duration in the S-21 in Russia, to the first air-mail service between the United States and Panama (in an S-38 piloted by Charles Lindbergh), to the first helicopter (the S-55) to fly across the Atlantic Ocean (1955), to the first helicopter (the S-58) to retrieve a U.S. astronaut, Commander Alan Shepard, America’s first man in space. No one has had a greater impact in a wider range of aeronautical fields.

Bibliography

Cochrane, Dorothy, Von Hardesty, and Russell Lee. The Aviation Careers of Igor Sikorsky. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989. Published for the National Air and Space Museum to mark both the hundredth anniversary of Sikorsky’s birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the first flight of the VS-300 helicopter, this volume is lavishly illustrated with photographs and design drawings, covering all three of Sikorsky’s aviation careers: “The Russian Period, 1889-1919,” “The Golden Age of Flight, 1919-39,” and “Vertical Flight, 1939-57.”

Delear, Frank J. Igor Sikorsky: His Three Careers in Aviation. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969. This authoritative biography, written while Sikorsky was still alive, covers his early life as well as his three remarkable careers. The book is illustrated by dozens of photographs from every stage of Sikorsky’s life.

Finne, K. N., Carl J. Bobrow, and Von Hardesty. Igor Sikorsky, the Russian Years. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987. Finne was a flight surgeon who worked with Sikorsky when he was developing planes for the Russian army, and this work was originally published when Finne was living in exile in Yugoslavia in 1930. Bobrow and Hardesty have translated and condensed Finne’s work, and they have added pages of appendixes as well as photographs and drawings illustrating Sikorsky’s various designs. Includes a special epilogue by Sikorsky’s eldest son, Sergei, covering his father’s later career in the United States.

Sikorsky, Sergei I. The Sikorsky Legacy. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2007. Traces the history of Sikorsky Aircraft and its founder, Sergei’s father, and contains more than two hundred photographs, many from the Sikorsky family archives. As Sergei was the only child who followed in his father’s footsteps, his story is both personal and knowledgeable about the technical aspects of his father’s career.

Spenser, Jay P. Whirlybirds: A History of the U.S. Helicopter Pioneers. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998. Looks at Sikorsky in relation to the others involved in the development of early helicopters.