B1-32 · Igor Sikorsky: From a Kyiv Dream to the Helicopter

Igor Sikorsky: From a Kyiv Dream to the Helicopter

When you see a helicopter rescuing people from a mountain or flying a sick child to the hospital, you are looking at a piece of Ukrainian history. The man who made the helicopter practical was born in Kyiv in 1889.

A boy with a dream. As a child, Igor Sikorsky read the novels of Jules Verne and dreamed of a machine that could rise straight up into the air. At twenty, while he was a student at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, he decided to build one. With money from his sister Olga, he went to Paris to buy an engine. Back in Kyiv, he built two helicopters in 1909 and 1910, but neither of them could lift a pilot. Many people would have stopped, but Igor refused to give up. He simply decided that the world was not ready for his helicopter yet.

Giants of the sky. Instead, he started building airplanes. In 1913, he flew Le Grand, one of the first planes in the world with four engines. A year later came Ilya Muromets, a huge plane with a heated cabin, a dining table and even a toilet. In 1914, it flew from St. Petersburg to Kyiv and back, a record journey.

Starting again. After the revolution of 1917, Sikorsky had to leave everything. In 1919, he arrived in New York with almost no money. He spent the days teaching math to other immigrants and the evenings drawing new planes. In 1923, he started his own company on a chicken farm on Long Island. Other immigrants helped him, and the famous composer Sergei Rachmaninoff gave him 5,000 dollars. In the 1930s, his flying boats carried passengers across oceans.

The first real helicopter. But Sikorsky didn't stop at building airplanes. In 1939, thirty years after his first try in Kyiv, he flew the VS-300 himself, wearing his favorite hat. It was the first practical helicopter with one big main rotor and a small tail rotor, the design that almost all helicopters still use today.

After Igor. Sikorsky believed in helping people more than in winning wars, and he was proud that his helicopters saved thousands of lives. He died in Connecticut in 1972. Today, the Sikorsky company belongs to the American giant Lockheed Martin, and Kyiv's second airport, Zhuliany, carries his name.

If you visit Kyiv, remember to see the house where Sikorsky grew up, on Yaroslaviv Val Street. And next time you see a helicopter, try to remember where it all started.