A Female Helicopter Trailblazer, the “Whirly Girls” and the Struggle for a Place in the Cockpit: Women in the ‘Contrails’ of Modern Aviation

Posted on August 25, 2021August 25, 2021 by E Curb Nottus

Aviation history, Gender wars, Society & Culture, Travel

When the first men managed through repeated trial-and-error to get manned “flying machines” off the ground, the first women pioneers weren’t that far behind them in getting into the skies. The first woman got her flying licence (Elise Deroche in France) less than nine years after the Wright brothers made their epic 59-second ‘hop’ – see the 2017 brace of articles elsewhere on this blogsite, Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part I (May 27, 2017) and Part II (May 31, 2017).

🔺Reitsch testing the FW-61 (Photo: ullstein bild via Getty Images)

While many women overcame obstacles on the way to a career as an aviatrix, those of their sex wanting to become helicopter pilots have found it even more difficult and onerous. The prospects around 1940 when the world’s first modern rotary-wing copter became fully functional looked bright enough for women. Nazi Germany’s pioneering aviatrix Hanna Reitsch was leading the way. In 1938 Reitsch☸ became the first woman to test fly a helicopter, Focke’s FW-61 helicopter, even going on to set a distance record for helicopter flight of 109km. She followed that up with the record (shared with another pilot) for being the first in the world to fly a copter in an enclosed space❇ (Sophie Jackson, Hitler’s Heroine, Hanna Reitsch (2014)).

🔺 Reitsch’s 1955 autobiography

Unfortunately, as the industry has grown since those formative days, female helicopter pilots trying to follow the trajectory of Reitsch’s stellar achievements in the air have found it much harder to penetrate the masculine preserve of the helicopter world. Today women still lag far behind in the gender stakes, in 2019 according to the Civil Aviation Authority women made up only 4.5% of the helicopter pilots in the UK, with just the single female instructor-examiner for the whole country (“International Women’s Day: ‘I’m teaching other women to fly helicopters’”, BBC, 08-Mar-2019, www.bbc.com).

The statistics are hardly more encouraging in the US. The Helicopter Association International puts the number of female pilots at around 5%, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) which pointedly has no specific data on women helicopter pilots estimates the figure at a perhaps generous 7.9%. (‘How These 2 Women Became The Helicopter Pilot and Reporter Inside Skyeye’, ABC13, 11-Mar-2021, www.abc13.com). Even more concerning, the percentage of women behind the controls has been stagnant over recent decades✴.

But it’s not from the lack of trying to effect change on the part of women aviators! The barriers to female entry into both the commercial and military fields of helicopters led pilot Jean Ross Howard Phelan (above), the 8th US woman to gain her helicopter accreditation, to form Whirly Girls International in 1955—an association dedicated to the advancement of women in helicopter aviation—with just 12 other charter members🈂. Today the group has 72,000 members from 44 countries.

The minuscule inroads made by women inside the sanctum of the “male cockpit” isn’t confined to rotary-wing aircraft. Women pilots have barely had more success in cracking the fixed-wing aircraft industry, their share of the jobs in the US has hovered somewhere between five and six-and-a-half percent. Despite all the efforts of women’s aviation bodies including the Ninety-Nines (the Whirly Girls’ “older sister” organisation) to make headway in rectifying the imbalance, women today constitute just 7% of the world’s certified pilots for all types of aircraft (‘Female Helicopter Pilots on The Rise’, Claire McCann, Prestige Helicopters, Inc., Upd.11-Nov-2020, www.prestigehelicopters.com).

The reasons flying has continued to be a male stronghold are many and varied. With so few women pilots—only 13 credentialed to fly helicopters by 1955—young women and girls have been bereft of visible role models and mentors to show the way. At school-level not enough effort have been made to make teenage girls aware of the opportunities there are in a flying career. The preponderance of male pilots perpetuates the “highly masculine image of aviation“, reinforcing the stereotype that the profession is “not a woman’s job” (Why There Aren’t More Female Pilots’, Katherine LaGrave, IMdiversity 08-Mar-2018, www.imdiversity.com). This in part comes back to a prevailing mentality of “Top Gun” chauvinism. Female pilots have commented on aviation still being an “old boys’ club” and the lack of support, bias and intimidation they experienced from men in the industry during their training (‘Chances Are Your Pilot Isn’t a Woman. Here’s Why’, Kimberly Perkins, Seattle Business, (nd), www.seattlebusinessmag.com). The issue of unhelpful male pilots for some women has led to another road block, the paucity of female instructors in the industry.

🔺 Ret.Col. Sally D Murphy, 1st female copter pilot in US Army

Once in the industry some women pilots have found themselves facing static career paths, the sheer lack of opportunities to attain seniority has eventually led a number of women in military and commercial aviation to prematurely leave the profession. Another criticism of the aviation industry is that it hasn’t embraced the change in work rules and conditions that other industries have…getting the work/life balance right is an issue of more importance to women who usually have to bear the brunt of child-rearing activities (‘Why are there so few women in aviation?’, Kathryn Creedy, CNN, 20-Nov-2019, www.cnn.com).

🔺 Cessna 172

Research suggests the prohibitive costs involved can be a barrier for women. Aircraft training in the US can cost up to US$150,000, add to this the soaring price of purchasing an entry-level commercial plane today…the (adjusted) price of buying a new Cessna 172 is four times greater than it was in 1960 (‘Why Are There So Few Female Pilots?, Rebecca Maksel, Air and Space, 06-Feb-2015, www.airspacemag.com).

🔺 Malaysia’s 1st female copter pilot (Photo: The Star (Mal.)

What makes the persistence of multiple barriers and obstacles blocking women from realising their professional pilot dreams maddeningly vexatious is the dilemma now facing the industry as a whole, a looming worldwide shortage of qualified pilots to take the reins of the big airliners. Some airlines like United in the US recently have flagged the introduction of quotas to increase pilot numbers for women and for minorities, but much more fundamental structural change is required before we see real progress in tackling the gender imbalance.

~~▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪~~

☸ having already been appointed a flugkapitän (flight captain), a position till then exclusively reserved for male German pilots

❇ later Reitsch was also the first woman to fly a rocket plane

✴ numbers in the US did initially rise from the 1960s to the 1980s but have plateaued since that point (Maksel)

🈂 member #1 was appropriately enough Hanna Reitsch

Theatre of the Absurd: Anti-Realism, Anti-Language, Anti-Play?

Posted on August 22, 2021September 5, 2021 by E Curb Nottus

Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Performing arts

A term you don’t hear much these days, even among the literati, is the Theatre of the Absurd. I first heard about this theatre genre in the Seventies, when I was introduced to the plays of Beckett and Pinter, and saw the film version of Ionesco’s play The Rhinceros. Even then the Theatre of the Absurd had a kind of Fifties/Sixties feel to it. So where did it come from? Well, we have drama critic and scholar Martin Esslin to thank for the expression. In the late Fifties Esslin drew the dots between the work of various, otherwise disparate and unconnected contemporary playwrights who shared a particular world view and a number of traits and preoccupations. Esslin circa 1960 wrote that these ‘Absurdist’ playwrights were attacking the “comfortable certainties of religious and political orthodoxy, shocking audiences out of their complacency, bringing them face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation”, ie, that it is essentially absurd.

The philosophical framework for Absurdism and the Theatre of the Absurd was laid by French Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. In his 1942 essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ Camus defines the human condition as basically meaningless and therefore absurd, arguing that “humanity had to resign itself to recognizing that a fully satisfying rational explanation of the universe (in Camus-speak = “formless chaos) was beyond its reach; in that sense, the world must ultimately be seen as absurd” (Crabb). Once we accept this inevitability we can get on with life.

(Source: alchetron.com)

The emergence of a new theatre in the Fifties which staunchly rejected realism and whose calling card was the statement life is meaningless was a reaction to the atrocities and unimaginable inhumanity of the Second World War. Interestingly, Esslin, following Camus, did not feel that the message of the Absurdists—the profound state of despair of humankind—was reason to be pessimistic about the world. Accepting the “mysteries of existence”—that we live in an irrational and “hostile universe” (Camus’ term), for which there are “no easy solutions” leaves (you) with “a sense of freedom and relief” and “the laughter of liberation” (Esslin).

(Image: redbubble.com)

Theatre of the Absurd precursors
Alfred Jarry’s 1896 play Ubu Roi is often thought of as “proto-Theatre of the Absurd”…bizarre, controversial, revolutionary, paper-thin plot, scatological scatterings, the characters speak in staccato sentences, Ubu Roi also highly influenced the Dadaist art and literary movement which along with Surrealism took its turn in passing the anti-realism torch on to the Theatre of the Absurd. Dadaism like the Absurdist plays was a reaction in part to war (WWI in this case)…as one of its main exponents Tristan Tzara explained: ”if human logic can lead the world to global war then art should abandon all logic and sense“. Likewise, Surrealism’s desire to shock audiences and its descent into the world of human dreams also anticipates some of the preoccupations of the Theatre of the Absurd.

Ionesco (Image: David Levine/NY Review)

A theatre movement disassociated from its creators
Unlike Surrealism and other arts genres, the Theatre of the Absurd was not a conscious movement. Despite Esslin identifying the Parisian avant-garde as its centre and Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Adamov the leading figures of the Absurdist movement, there was no organised school of playwrights who identified themselves as its practitioners. Some like Ionesco in fact strongly objected to the label, preferring in his case the term “Theatre of Derision” to delineate his work. The exponents of this form of theatre were loosely associated, each of the playwrights arrived independently at a similar style and a vision of the futility of human existence.

A Revolutionary and subversive Theatre of the Absurd
Playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco were committed to exploring absurdism in all its manifestations – philosophical, dramaturgical, existential, emotional, a radical form of drama that pushed the boundaries of theatre to the extremes (Dickson)…it’s distinctive features and innovations subverting the established theatre of the day. The Theatre of the Absurd radically departs from traditional theatrical conventions…dispensing with the conventional narrative of the “well-made play” with a beginning, a middle and an end, plots are typically disorganised, often with a non-linear or cyclical approach (“ever diminishing concentric circles”), nothing happens or if it does, it’s in a unmotivated way. Mysteries go unresolved and order is not restored at the end. Characters have no clear identities and have a homogeneity to them (eg, The Rhinoceros), they are not consistent even interchangeable (eg, Genet’s The Maids), characters don’t develop and are devoid of motivation or purpose.

(Source/ Exeunt NYC)

Estragon: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful”.

Externally waiting for Godot
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was one of the earliest and best known plays to be so designated, becoming an exemplar of Adsurdist theatre. It was controversially received when it premiered in 1953, later famously described by critic Vivian Mercer as “a play in which nothing happens, twice”. ‘Godot’ is a bleak tragi-comedy soaked in “existential despair”. The bleakness of the play is reinforced by the setting: no recognisable time or place❅, sparse set, minimally furnished. Stylistically the play is repetitive, open-ended almost empty of action but with snatches of vaudeville and philosophy. Characters utter illogical and circular dialogue while they wait…and wait for the title character (who never appears). Beckett’s later plays became more and more reductionist, language pared back towards “Endgame” silence.

Beckett’s ‘Endgame’ (Photo: New York Times)

The war on language
The breakdown of language is a preoccupation in Absurdist Theatre. In Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano language disintegrates rapidly, demonstrating it’s failure as a tool of communication. Nonsense dialogue, characters speaking in gibberish, absurdist dramas often abound in cliches, slogans and non-sequiturs. The plays of Ionesco and NF Simpson also specialise in satirising “the modern prostitution of language corrupted by salesmen and politicians”. Ionesco distinguished between the way he and Beckett assailed language: “Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words“ (Interview, Paris Review, 1984).

Representing British colours in the Club de l’Absurde were Harold Pinter (The Dumb Waiter) and Tom Stoppard…the latter’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead involves a “Godot-esque” waiting game with a similar sense of anticlimax. ‘Ros’ and ‘Guil’, relocated from Hamlet, are interchangeable characters who pass the time engaging in philosophical musings and mind-numbing circular discourses with each other.

Camus, ‘godfather’ of Absurdist Theatre (Photo: The Telegraph, UK)

Footnote: Trans-Atlantic Absurdist
Although essentially a European movement, Esslin (less convincingly) includes American Edward Albee into the collection of Absurdist dramatists on the basis that his plays (eg, The Zoo Story) attack “America’s foundation of optimism”.

‘Zoo Story’ (Photo: Front Row Center)

———-———-———-
❅ a feature of Theatre of the Absurd plays is a sense of timelessness

💢💢💢

Bibliography:

Martin Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd (1961)

Jerome P. Crabb, ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’, Theatre Database, 2006, www.theatredatabase.com

‘Nonsense talk: Theatre of the Absurd’, Andrew Dickson, Discovering Literature: 20th century, 07-Sep-2017, www.bl.uk

‘Absurdity in Theater: Ubu Roi’, Nermin Büsra Kirisik, Artil, www.artilmagazine.com

‘Beckett, Ionesco and the Theater if the Absurd: Crash Course Theater #45′ (Video, 2018)

The Far-Right in the Balkans Between the Wars: Yugoslavia and Croatia’s Ustaše Movement

Posted on August 17, 2021August 18, 2021 by Sloane Snodgrasse

Comparative politics, Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, National politics, Racial politics, Regional History

Having delved recently into the historic fascist groups in Hungary and Romania between the wars—“Arrow Cross and Iron Guard: The Native Fascist Movements in Interwar Hungary and Romania”, blog 10-Aug-2021)—I thought it’d be interesting to take a comparative look at their contemporary counterpart in Yugoslavia. The most conspicuous fascist organisation active in post-WWI Yugoslavia shared many of the features of other European far-right movements while exhibiting some characteristics that departed from the standard typology of European fascism.

⇑ Alexander I, the “Royal Dictator”

Fear of a Pan-Serbia
Like all European fascist groups in the interwar period the “home-grown” fascist movement embodied in the Croatian Revolutionary Movement, known as Ustaše🆚 (or anglicised as ‘Ustasha’) evolved out of discontent with the new national arrangements following the conclusion of hostilities. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia (originally the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), came into existence from a ”polyglot mosaic of little states“. From the start there was a built-in tension between the centralism of the unitary Yugoslav state and Serbia and the federalist impulses of the other nationalities. Feeding and intensifying Croatian nationalism was Serbian control over the new state – the head of state, the king, was a Serb and the Yugoslav army was essentially Serbian. What wrangled most Croats was that “the new Yugoslavia was not a state of narodno jedinstvo (national unity) (as promised) but a greater Serbia in all but name“ (Judah). In the early years of the kingdom, the political voice of Croatian disapproval of the lop-sided state of affairs came from the moderately rightist Croatian Peasants Party (CPP), who advocated for land reform to alleviate the conditions of Croatian peasantry (75% of the kingdom’s population was agrarian-based). The assassination of the CPP leader in parliament was followed by a coup by King Alexander who installed a “personal dictatorship” and a political crackdown. In response to the crisis Ante Pavelić a former CPP member formed the extremist Ustaše Party🅾️.

Ustasé ideology
The Ustaše movement’s ideological framework contained many of the traits typically found in other European far-right groups—ultranationalism❎ (stridently advocating the uniqueness of the Croatian nation); rabidly racist (though it’s antisemitism seems to have become more visible later after prompting from the Nazis); the significance of religion (Catholicism in its case) and patriarchal life; anti-communist (rejecting Marxism for it’s interference with family life); anti-capitalist and also anti-democratic, believing that the mechanism of parliamentary democracy was corrupt; adopting the personality cult common to most fascist organisations (Pavelić under the influence of the big dictators Mussolini and Hitler styled himself Poglavnik, broadly analogous to Il Duce and Führer, and following the cult’s blueprint demanding unswerving submission to the will of the leader.

Constructing a separate racial theory
The Ustaše view of the racial origins of the Croatian people was a complicated one, but one that suited their national aspirations, to create “a completely independent, ethnically homogeneous nation-state”…this requited separating ’pure’ Croats from the melange of ethnic and religious minorities in Croatia, especially from the more numerous Serbs. Ustaše party ideologues set about trying to minimise the Croats’ Slavic roots while developing the idea that the Croats‘ hybrid stock comprised a kind of “Ayran-Nordic-Dinaric” amalgam, which they contrasted with the alleged “Balkan-Vlach” identity of the Serbs. The Ustaše identified the Croats as descending from the Goths and therefore of Germanic stock, a contrivance by Pavelić by which he hoped “to curry favour with the Nazis”Ⓜ (Bartulin, ‘Ideology of Nation and Race’). The Ustaše aped other aspects of Nazi racial vilification, applying the derogatory term Untermensch (“sub-human) to its scapegoats, Serbs, Jews, etc.

⇑ “A slave never!” (Source: Pinterest.ca)

National regeneration: Forward to the past
As we saw with the Iron Guard Movement’s Omol nou in Romania, Ustaše theory extolled the concept of Novi čovjek, the “New Man”. The movement’s mission as it saw it was to ‘reawaken’ the racially authentic (ie, ‘Aryan’) Croat—the koljenović—who had been corrupted and debased by centuries of foreign rule. The Ustaše Novi čovjek aligns with a core element of generic fascism, formulated by political theorist Roger Griffin called “palingenetic ultranationalism”, which combines “a myth of rebirth or regeneration” with a nationalism that is populist and “radically anti-liberal”, ie, ultranationalism. In the world according to Ustaše, the regenerated Croat warrior, heroic and uber-masculine, is the conduit for a new order to replace the old “decadent and decaying” one.

Ustaše and Iron Guard
Commonalities between the Ustaše movement and Romania’s Iron Guard fascists were many, both were deeply mystical organisations, preoccupied with a death cult and notions of violence and martyrdom (though the Ustašhe didnt express the same degree of intense religious ritualism as Iron Guard). Both Ustaše and Iron Cross members tended to see the world in extreme Manichean terms, regularly evoking the imagery of the ”overtly apocalyptic and chiliastic” (Yeomans).

⇑ Ustaše: anti-Jewish propaganda (Source: www.vostokian.com)

Ustaše militias unleashed an unrestrained violent onslaught to deal with the perceived enemies of Croatia, terrorist targeting of political foes, assassinations, shootings, knifings, bombings, etc. The pattern of party violence culminated in attempts at outright genocide when Pavelić’s fascists gained power in Yugoslavia during World War One. Ustaše ‘reprisals’ were concentrated against the Serbs, Jews and Roma who came under their area of control – estimations of atrocities committed the Ustaše and the authorities vary, somewhere between 320,000 and 340,000 ethnic Serbian civilians were slaughtered in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in just one year of an out-of-control, manic bloodlust. Another Ustaše strategy supposedly to purify the NDH or the “Independent State of Croatia”—accomplished with the collaboration of Croatian Catholic clergy—was the forcible conversion of somewhere in the vicinity of 250,000 Orthodox Serbs and Jews⛎. In a further emulation of Nazi extermination methods Ustaše built a notorious concentration camp in Slavonia, Jasenovac, where upward of 100,000 Serbs, Roma and Jews were barbarically killed during the war (consequently Jasenovac is known as the “Auschwitz of the Balkans”).

Footnote: Women in the Ustaše world
Just as the Ustaše envisaged a new type of Croatian man reinvigorated with the lost values of valour and struggle, it wanted to return Croatian women to a previous, less pluralist life. The Ustaše railed against the sexual status quo, against an encroaching feminism which had liberated women from the home, becoming, in Ustaše eyes, “cafe dolls without children”, sacrificing family for their careers. The movement wanted to revive the cult of motherhood, making Croatian women submissive and dutiful home bodies again, procreating a new generation of Croats. At the same time the Ustaše hierarchy organised women into their own separate body called the “Vine of Ustaše Women”, their main task was to act as social workers of sorts, circulating among the peasant women in Croatia to bring about improvements in their lives. Interestingly, as Rory Yeomans outlined, the leadership received pushback from militant young female members of the movement who wanted the same opportunity as Ustaše men to become warriors and immerse themselves in the revolutionary activities of the cause. In any event, the drain on Croatian manpower during the war necessitated a re-expansion of female roles to fill the gaps left by men in offices and factories and even in the military ranks (Yeomans).

“Greater Croatia” ⇑

Postscript: The Ustaše fascists failed to establish a mass base of support as a precondition for its revolutionary movement that Arrow Cross and Iron Guard movements achieved in their respective countries. And in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Croatian peasantry, Ustaše never matched the appeal of CPP. Added to this, Ustaše’s growing chauvinistic stance in pursuing a “Greater Croatia” ensured it made no headway in trying to appeal to any other national group in the country. Ustaše as a consequence was forced to draw on Croatian students, right wing intellectuals and the lower clergy for its core support. An additional brake on Ustaše power was the effectiveness of opposition from the left in Yugoslavia—in stark contrast to the situation in Romania and Hungary—from the well-organised communist party (brilliantly led by Tito).

⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫⌫

🆚 = ‘Insurgents’

🅾️ the spiritual antecedent to Ustaše was probably the right wing nationalist Party of Rights (including the Frankovci cell)

❎ Ustaše‘s brand of fascism was ultranationalistic, see ’National regeneration: Forward to the past‘

Ⓜ for his part, Hitler was at best lukewarm toward Pavelić’s movement, considering them too violently aggressive, preferring a stable and neutral Yugoslavian regime to allow Germany to continue to access it’s raw materials during the war. The Nazis only reluctantly turned to the Ustaše as a “puppet government’ after civil war broke out in Yugoslavia

⛎ assistance given by the Catholic Church to Ustaše reached the highest pinnacle. At war’s end, when things turned dire for Pavelić and his cronies, the Vatican facilitated their escape to Argentina via the notorious German “Rat line” by issuing them clerical passports (Stockton)

♠ ♣ ♠ ♣

Texts and articles consulted:

‘Staging the Nation’s Rebirth: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Context of Fascist Studies’, Roger Griffin, Library of Social Science’, www.libraryofsocialscience.com

‘Ideology of Nation and Race: The Croatian Ustasha Regime and its Policies Toward the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945)’, Nevenko Bartulin, Croatian Studies Review, 5 (2008)

Rory Yeomans. “Militant Women, Warrior Men and Revolutionary Personae: The New Ustasha Man and Woman in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945.” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 83, no. 4, 2005, pp. 685–732. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4214175. Accessed 12 Aug. 2021

Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (3rd edition, 2009)

Nevenko Bartulin, The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia: Origins and Theory (2014)

‘Meet the Ustaše, The Brutal Nazi Allies Even Hitler Couldn’t Control’, Richard Stockton, ATI, Upd. 6-Jun-2020, www.allthatsinteresting.com

Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919-1953 (1991)

In Pursuit of Vertical Take-off and Autorotation Landing: From Rotorcraft to Autogyro to Practical Helicopter

Posted on August 12, 2021August 24, 2021 by E Curb Nottus

Aviation history, Military history, New Technology,

🚁 Helicopter, from the Greek: helix (‘spiral’ or ‘whirl’ or ’convolution’) + pteron (‘wing’); into French: hélicoptère.

We know that manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight in an aircraft began with the Wright brothers in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina—unless that is you accept the audacious alternate candidate, Gustave Whitehead’s flight in Connecticut made two years earlier🅰—but when did the first helicopter get off the ground? The primitive archetype seems to be the brainchild of Frenchman Paul Cornu. Cornu, like the brothers Wright, started off as a bicycle maker before veering off into the nascent field of aerodynamic engineering.

Getting the concept off the ground
Near Lisieux in northern France in 1907, Monsieur Cornu became the first person to (ever so briefly) pilot an airborne rotary-wing, vertical-lift aircraft. The rotorcraft (using an unpowered rotor in free autorotation to develop lift) from Cornu’s own design was a twin-rotor job, the blades rotating in opposite directions which neutralised the torque. M. Cornu’s craft levitated about 1.5 metres off the ground, hovering for some 20 seconds. The Cornu ”Ur-copter” wasn’t manoeuvrable at all (requiring manpower to hold it in position from the ground) and therefore wasn’t practical, but it is considered to be a forerunner of the modern helicopter.

De la Cierva and the autogyro
From 1912 on, numerous inventors and engineers were turning their hands to building prototypes of the rotorcraft, but with limited or ephemeral success. Compared to fixed-wing aircrafts, progress with rotorcrafts evolved very slowly, due to intrinsic problems with torque, dissymmetry of lift and control. Sikorsky (below) spent 30 years working on developing helicopters before his breakthrough. Etienne Oehmichen, whose early prototypes included vertically-mounted rotors and a tail rotor, allowing it to fly a distance of one kilometre in 1924! Oehmichen was also the first to carry passengers in his Oehmichen No. 2 helicopter. By the early 1920s Spanish aviator and engineer Juan De la Cierva built the autogyro (sometimes called a “windmill plane” or ‘gyroplane’)… his success advanced the understanding of rotor dynamics. Cierva’s autogiro had air safety in mind, proposing a solution to the craft losing its lift or stalling even at very low speeds. The Spaniard worked out that the autogyro’s rotor function is driven by the speed of the air, cf. the helicopter’s which depends on a motor…in the descent of the autogyro the rotor functioned as a kind of parachute according to Cierva. Ultimately, the helicopter’s superior velocity made it the preferable mode of aerocraft, however Cierva’s principle of the self-turning rotor remained a vital contribution to the later development of functional helicopters. Cierva’s flapping rotor blades has been described as “the single most important discovery in helicopter development” (CV Glines). A countryman of Cornu’s, Louis Bréguet, also experimented with the autogyro in the Thirties, his Bréguet-Dorand “Gyroplane Laboratoire” improving both the craft’s speed to 120km/h and its control capacity.
Another step forward in the evolution of helicopters came from Nazi Germany. Professor Heinrich Focke applied Cierva’s pioneering work on aerodynamics to the task of transitioning from the limitations of the autogyro to the creation of a “pure helicopter”. In 1936 Focke and Gerd Achgelis‘ Focke-Wulf Fw-61 smashed existing helicopter records for range and altitude and demonstrated autorotation descent to landing. This plus a control system much more reliable and robust than earlier rotorcrafts leads many aviation geeks to consider the Fw-61 to be “the world’s first truly functional helicopter”.

Sikorsky’s practical copter
What Cornu started, Russian-born American designer Igor Sikorsky brought to commercial fruition. Sikorsky invented the first mass-produced, and in the opinion of many, the first practical helicopter, the VS-300, in Stratford, Connecticut in 1939🅱. In commercial production called the R–4, it would go on to play a significant role in the Second World War. By the war’s end Sikorsky had added the R–5 and the R–6 models, specifically designed for the military and specialising in search-and-rescue missions. Although he didn’t invent the first prototype of the helicopter, Sikorsky is commonly thought of as “the father of helicopters” because “he invented the first successful helicopter upon which further designs were based”. The VS-300 became the model for all modern single-rotor helicopters.

༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺

🅰 see the November 2014 blog on this site, ‘Wright or Not Right?: The Controversy over who really was “First in Flight”’

🅱 Sikorsky’s 1939 flight was actually tethered, so the first ‘free’ copter flight (also by Sikorsky) didn’t take place until the following year, 1940

☬ ☬ ☬ ☬ ☬

Sites and articles consulted:

‘History of Flight: Breakthroughs, Disasters and More’, Aaron Randle, Inside History, 09-Jul-2021, www.insidehistory.com

’Focke-Wulf Fw-61’, Modelling Madness, Brian R Baker, www.modellingmadness.com

‘World’s First Helicopter — Today in History: September 14’, September 14, 2018, Connecticut History.org, www.connecticuthistory.org

‘History of the Helicopter’, Mary Bellis, ThoughtCo, Upd. 04-Oct-2019, www.thoughtco.com

‘Who Invented the Helicopter? (and When?)’, Aerocorner, www.aerocorner.com

‘Juan de la Cierva: Autogiro Genius’, C.V. Glines, Aviation History, Sept 2012, www.au.readly.com

‘History of the Helicopter from Concept to Modern Day’, Prime Industries Inc, 31-Aug-2015, www.primeinustriesusa.com

’Juan de la Cierva and the Autogyro’s Invention’, Javier Yanes, Ventana al Conocimiento, 21-Sep-2015, www.bbvaopenmind.com

Just blogging away … doing the hard blog

Continuing the search for signs of Intelligent Life in the University.

A Female Helicopter Trailblazer, the “Whirly Girls” and the Struggle for a Place in the Cockpit: Women in the ‘Contrails’ of Modern Aviation

Theatre of the Absurd: Anti-Realism, Anti-Language, Anti-Play?

The Far-Right in the Balkans Between the Wars: Yugoslavia and Croatia’s Ustaše Movement

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In Pursuit of Vertical Take-off and Autorotation Landing: From Rotorcraft to Autogyro to Practical Helicopter