Pilots

Fourteen-year-old Sergei Sikorsky just barely missed being an eyewitness to history — his father Igor's first tethered flight in the very first helicopter, the VS-300, on September 14, 1939. "But I was there probably a week later when he made his first untethered hops and jumps," says Sikorsky. "[Igor] did most of his flying fairly well dressed," Sikorsky explains. "He was from an older world, where men always wore jackets and neckties." And bowler hats — which stayed on Igor's head through all that rotor downdraft, while he mastered flying the unstable open-cockpit helicopter.

Like his dad, Sergei Sikorsky oozes old-world charm. He is polite, gentle, and dignified. You can discern a hint of some kind of European accent in his voice as he recalls his life. "I was proud of dad long before the helicopter," he recalls. Igor was a White Russian, a supporter of the Czar, who abandoned his country around the time of the Communist revolution. Before doing so, though, he built the world's first four-engine airplane, the Bolshoi Baltiskii, in 1913. Eventually, he made his way to the United States and began building huge amphibious airplanes, which airlines such as Pan Am chose for flying pioneering routes to South America and throughout the Pacific islands.

Sergei was born in 1925, and he remembers such aviation luminaries as Charles Lindbergh, Juan Tripp (Pan Am's president), and air racer Roscoe Turner being invited to the Sikorsky home for lunch. His first flight was in one of his father's amphibians — an S-38 twin. As a 10-year-old he sat on his father's lap in the amphib's right seat while the company's chief test pilot taxied it down the ramp at the Sikorsky plant in Stratford, Connecticut, and into the Housatonic River. The pilot gave her power and took off for a brief test hop over Long Island Sound. "I remember seeing the horizon expanding miraculously," he says. "That's when I decided to become a pilot."

He started flight training in 1940 — in a Piper J-3 Cub — and almost had his pilot certificate when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. "Then much of aviation was shut down like September 11, and the flying schools had to move inland 100 miles," he says. But he did solo in 1942 and was drafted when he came of age. It wasn't until the end of the war that Sergei soloed in a helicopter. Still, most of his flying has been in fixed-wing aircraft: 2,200 hours versus 600 hours in helicopters. He has so many more airplane than helicopter hours for the "simple reason that Sikor-sky for many years led the pack in building bigger and heavier helicopters," he says. "Unfortunately, that had a side effect of increasing per-hour costs. I was a fairly good pilot on the old S-55, H-19, and H-34, but when they began to build the S-61 series the cost per flying hour got too expensive. I couldn't see justifying flying 20 or 25 hours in an aircraft as complex as an S-61. I would be a threat to myself and anybody flying with me." Wait — the son of the helicopter's inventor had to pay to fly his father's machines? "I worked for United Aircraft, and United Aircraft was a fairly conservative company," says Sikorsky. So, like anyone else, he had to fork over the cash or stay on the ground.

In about 1952 the company sent him to Europe on the first of many overseas assignments. He mastered German, French, and Italian, in addition to Russian — enough to give technical lectures on the exacting details of helicopters. He marketed helicopters in Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, and if the number ordered justified production in that country, he became an engineering liaison in the factory built there by United Aircraft.

He introduced the S-58 into the German armed forces, then was part of a marketing campaign to sell the Germans a heavy transport helicopter, the CH-53. The contract was worth $500 million. "I was very proud to send the cable that the Germans had committed to comanufacture 120 CH-53 helicopters," he says.

In 1992 he retired at age 67 and eventually moved just outside of Phoenix. As a hobby, and possibly for a book, he's collecting anecdotes and aphorisms by his father about flight. "I treasure the comments of my father describing his start in aviation in '08 or '09." Among them: "We were ignorant, and we were ignorant of the fact that we were ignorant. That is ignorance squared, and it can lead to disaster." Another: "At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation."

Sergei turns 78 on February 1. "I'm looking seriously at renewing my license," he says. "Talking about airplanes," Sikorsky says, "is a very pleasant mental disease."