GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Helicopters

Someone asked the master about the principles of mounting to dangerous heights and traveling into the vast inane. The Master said, some have made flying cars with wood from the inner part of the jujube tree, using ox-leather straps fastened to returning blades so as to set the machine in motion.

Book titled Pao Phu Tau

Fourth Century BC, earliest description of a helicopter, in the form of a childs toy.

I have discovered that a screw-shaped device such as this, if it is well made from starched linen, will rise in the air if turned quickly.

Leonardo da Vinci

Codex Atlanticus, describing his (never built) Helical Air Screw, 1478-1519.



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This machine was a failure to the extent that it could not fly. In other respects it was a very important and necessary stepping stone.

Igor Sikorsky

Regards the first helicopter, built 1909.

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Professor Focke and his technicians standing below grew ever smaller as I continued to rise straight up, 50 metres, 75 metres, 100 metres. Then I gently began to throttle back and the speed of ascent dwindled till I was hovering motionless in midair. This was intoxicating! I thought of the lark, so light and small of wing, hovering over the summer fields. Now man had wrested from him his lovely secret, how to rise up into the sky and stand there, in the fore-court of the sun, midway between heavven and earth.

Hanna Reitsch

German test pilot, describing the her first helicopter flight in 1937. From her 1954 book Flying is My Life.

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Demonstrated publicly at the Cuatro Vientos airport in Spain, the craft amazed and fascinated the whole aeronautical world. It was safe. Once … it climbed too steeply and lost all its forward motion, which, for the conventional aeroplane, would have meant plummeting to earth. This did not occur.

Colonel Hollingsworth F. Gregory, USAAF

On witnessing the first autogiro. In his 1938 book The Helicopter.

The helicopter is probably the most versatile instrument ever invented by man. It approaches closer than any other to fulfillment of mankind's ancient dreams of the flying horse and the magic carpet.

Igor Sikorsky

Comment on 20th anniversary of the helicopter’s first flight, 13 September 1959. Quoted in 2011 book In The Story of the Winged-S: The Autobiography of Igor I. Sikorsky.

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The helicopter appeared so reluctant to fly forward that we even considered turning the pilot’s seat around and letting it fly backward.

Igor Sikorsky

Regards the prototype VS-300, 1940.

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The thing is, helicopters are different from planes. An airplane by it’s nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly.

A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in this delicate balance the helicopter stops flying; immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.

This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts and helicopter pilots are brooding introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to.

Harry Reasoner

ABC TV Evening News, 16 February 1971.

Like all novices we began with the helicopter in childhood, but soon saw that the helicopter had no future, and dropped it. The helicopter does with great labor only what the balloon does without labor, and is no more fitted than the balloon for rapid horizontal flight. If its engine stops, it must fall with deathly violence, for it can neither glide like the aeroplane or float like the balloon. The helicopter is much easier to design than the aeroplane, but is worthless when done.

Wilbur Wright

Letter written in 1907. Quoted in the 1954 book Miracle at Kitty Hawk: The Letters of Wilbur and Orville Wright.

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A new impetus was given to aviation by the relatively enormous power for weight of the atomic engine; it was at last possible to add Redmaynes’s ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force of the aeroplane without over-weighting the machine, and men found themselves possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover or ascend or descend vertically and gently as rush wildly through the air. The last dread of fliing vanished.

As the journalists of the time phased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new atomic aeroplane became indeed a mania; everyone of means was frantic to possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from the dust and danger of the road, and in France in the year 1943 thirty thousand of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and soared humming softly into the sky.

H. G. Wells

The World Set Free, a novel set in the 1950’s, written in 1914.

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The only practical solution is to combine the automobile with an airplane and this no doubt will happen during the next few decades. The Helicopter Automobile or, for short, the helicar, will not take up very much more room than the present large 7-passenger automobile, nor will it weigh much more than our present-day car, but instead of rolling down the avenue, you will go straight up in the air, and follow the air traffic lines, then descend at any place you wish. This descent can be made in the middle of the street, if necessary. The car may roll through the street, and may rise in an open place, or square, of which there will be many in the future.

While it will be possible for a car to alight on the ground in a narrow street, traffic regulations may prohibit this, and the aerial ascent and descent will be made from these public squares or parks. The Helicar will be particularly useful for suburbanites to fly to and from work, and for pleasure. Even today our roads, whether they be suburban or country, are so clogged with traffic that it is impossible to get anywhere on time.

Hugo Gernsback

In Science and Invention magazine, May 1923. This before a helicopter had ever flown!

The helicopter has never achieved much success and, for the present purpose, it may be classed with the ornithopter as obsolete. The autogiro, therefore, is the first practical moving-wing aircraft.

Oliver Stewart

Aeolus, or, The Future of the Flying Machine, 1928. The title is explained in the first paragraph of the Introduction:

“The aeroplane is an aerial sailing-ship, its wings are the sails, its source of power the wind. It can claim to be a direct descendant of the family of sailing-ships whose father wsa Aerlus, god of the winds and the inventor of sails.”

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Automobiles will start to decline almost as soon as the last shot is fired in World War II. The name of Igor Sikorsky will be as well known as Henry Ford’s, for his helicopter will all but replace the horseless carriage as the new means of popular transportation. Instead of a car in every garage, there will be a helicopter… These ‘copters’ will be so safe and will cost so little to produce that small models will be made for teenage youngsters. These tiny ’copters, when school lets out, will fill the sky as the bicycles of our youth filled the prewar roads.

Harry Bruno

Aviation publicist, 1943.

The way to fly is to go straight up … Such a machine (the helicopter) will never compete with the aeroplane, though it will have specialized uses, and in these it will surpass the aeroplane. The fact that you can land at your front door is the reason you can’t carry heavy loads efficiently.

Emile Berliner

1948

Oh, I’ve lifted to a hover in a blowing gusty wind.
I’ve chased the tail in circles with a denture ruining grin.
I’ve done my hovering autos and wondered as I rode,
why the helo is so attracted to an out-of-state zip code.
I’ve squeezed the pole and throttle til my arm was puffed and tight,
and studied helo theory books til way late in the night.
I’ve settled with power, and heard instructor's shout,
I have squeezed the cyclic grip so hard the black was oozing out.
Now high flight in the heavens is not a thing I need
for 1000 feet above the ground my nose begins to bleed.
I’ve played and played for hours as I hovered round and round,
while all the time I was flying just a foot above the ground.
I’m sure that drugs are cheaper and easier to acquire,
than the PPL for Helo which is what has lit my fire.
I’ve read the other poem and find it really odd,
that author had the freedom to touch the face of God
'Cause I even have a tight grip on the seat cushion.

Low Flight (3)

Stuart Fields, former publisher of Experimental Helo magazine.

If helicopters are so safe, how come there are no vintage/classic helicopter fly-ins?

Anon

Taking on the impossible is not necessarily easier, but it's more satisfying, it’s more motivating and, in the end, it’s more important.

Todd Reichert

Who along with Cameron Robertson and the AeroVelo team did the ‘impossible’, and built a human-powered helicopter that flew 10 feet into the air and hover in one place for 60 seconds, 13 June 2013. They won the American Helicopter Society’s Igor I. Sikorsky Human-Powered Helicopter Prize, along with $250,000. Quoted in Scientific American, November 2014.

In Wired magazine he also said: “It isn’t really about the prize. It’s about satisfaction of finishing something that you have set yourself to.”

Real planes use only a single stick to fly. This is why bulldozers & helicopters — in that order — need two.

Paul Slattery

I never liked riding in helicopters because there's a fair probability that the bottom part will get going around as fast as the top part.

Lt. Col. John Wittenborn, USAFR

I could be president of Sikorsky for six months before they found me out, but the president would only have my job for six seconds before he'd kill himself.

Walter R. 'Dick' Faull

Helicopter test pilot. Email communication, 1998.

Two Echo X-Ray, you’re still too low level for flight following at this time.

Southern California ATC

Last recorded transmission to N72EX, a Sikorsky S-76B helicopter, before it apparently crashed killing all nine people onboard, including basketball great Kobe Bryant. 26 January 2020.

PAT25 has the aircraft in sight, request visual separation.

PAT25

Last radio transmission from PAT25, an Army Black Hawk helicopter flying down the Potomac River before mid-air crash with American Airlines Flight 5342, a Bombardier CRJ700 regional jet turning to land at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, 29 January 2025.

If a man is in need of rescue, an airplane can come in and throw flowers on him, and that’s just about all. But a direct lift aircraft could come in and save his life.

Igor Sikorsky

1947. This is the exact wording from the Sikorsky Archives. The line is often misquoted in a somewhat cleaner format as “If you are in trouble anywhere in the world, an airplane can fly over and drop flowers, but a helicopter can land and save your life”.



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Please accept my sincere thanks for your recent letter and for the enclosure describing the Sao Paulo helicopter rescues. I had it read to me (my eyesight has failed to such an extent that I can no longer read) and found it interesting indeed.

I always believed that the helicopter would be an outstanding vehicle for the greatest variety of life-saving missions and now, near the close of my life, I have the satisfaction of knowing this has proved to be true.

Igor Sikorsky

Letter to Jerome Lederer of the Flight Safety Foundation
25 October 1972. It is the last letter dictated and signed by Mr. Sikorsky. He died the next day, at age 84. This is the file copy held by the Sikorky Archives:



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