‘A person who can drive an automobile can fly a helicopter’
Igor Sikorsky was nothing if not optimistic about the idea of a personal helicopter for everyone (an idea that should now send any reasonable person to the brink of terror) in this 1942 article in The Atlantic.
A question certain to trouble you is this: With hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of helicopters flying in all directions at once, what about sky congestion and air traffic problems?
This problem has been foreseen and already a certain amount of planning has been done. While air traffic problems will not be at all comparable to what we now have with the motorcar, there must certainly be one-way air lanes within the limits and in the neighborhood of big centers of population. There will be “slow” and “fast” altitudes and you will choose the one that suits your temperament. Naturally, all helicopter highways will be at a safe distance from the airplane levels.
All helicopters, of course, will remain at a reasonable altitude over thickly populated centers. But there need be no such “flight plan ” as airplanes now must often submit to before undertaking a long journey. Helicopter owners will fly at will, bound only by their common sense and some general traffic rules which are easily obeyed in the vast reaches of the sky.
Nor will the strict physical examination that now might prohibit many thousands from flying an airplane be necessary. A person who can drive an automobile can fly a helicopter; and a man or woman with middle-aged reflexes is just as safe in one as in the other because the helicopter, as a rule, is always moving slowly when close to the ground. The helicopter owner will have to pass no stricter examination than is—or should be—necessary for driving a motorcar. He should not be color-blind, his vision should be normal with or without glasses. A man or woman with a heart ailment should not drive a helicopter—nor an automobile.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010 at 7:21 am and is filed under Cities, Commuting, Congestion, Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 22nd, 2010 at 8:51 am
During the day, it usually takes me a long time to spot other airplanes air traffic control points out to me — they’re really hard to see. I appreciate Sikorsky’s enthusiasm for his product, but I wonder how he could have thought helicopters pilots wouldn’t face similar difficulties as the airplane pilots then faced. By the 1940s, many (if not most) of the basic difficulties of flying had already been worked out, with much of the experience being paid for by pilots’ lives.
September 22nd, 2010 at 9:54 am
London has some interesting rules about where helicopters can fly: http://everything2.com/title/crashing+a+helicopter+in+Central+London+is+illegal
September 23rd, 2010 at 3:16 pm
“A man or woman with a heart ailment should not drive a helicopter — nor an automobile” - Haw!
September 24th, 2010 at 11:57 am
I’m a skydiver and to compare this to parachute canopy flight, I’m not talking about freefall or canopy deployment, it’s a solidly terrible idea.
Even with un-powered, mechanically simple, slow moving aircraft that have an extensive training and licensing regimen and that are made out of cloth, collisions, entanglements and landing accidents happen with alarming frequency, sometimes with fatal results.
I think we should chock this article up to a degree of naiveté and aggressive optimism about technology that predominated during the middle of the twentieth century.