Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky (25 May 1889 – 26 October 1972) was a Russian-American aviation pioneer in both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. His first success came with the Sikorsky S-2, the second aircraft of his design and construction. His fifth airplane, the S-5, won him national recognition in Russia and secured F.A.I. pilot's license number 64. His S-6-A received the highest award at the 1912 Moscow Aviation Exhibition, and in the fall of that year the aircraft won first prize for its young designer, builder and pilot in the military competition at Saint Petersburg. In 1913, the Sikorsky-designed Russky Vityaz (S-21) became the first successful four-engine aircraft to take flight. He also designed and built the Ilya Muromets (S-22 – S-27) family of four-engine aircraft, an airliner which he redesigned to be the world's first four-engine bomber when World War I broke out. After emigrating to the United States in 1919 because of the Russian Revolution, Sikorsky founded the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation in 1923 and developed the first of Pan American Airways' ocean-crossing flying boats in the 1930s, including the Sikorsky S-42 "Flying Clipper". In 1939, Sikorsky designed and flew the Vought-Sikorsky VS-300, the first viable American helicopter, which pioneered the single main rotor and a single antitorque tail rotor configuration used by most helicopters today. Sikorsky modified the design into the Sikorsky R-4, which became the world's first mass-produced helicopter in 1942.
Early life Igor Sikorsky was born in Kiev, Russian Empire (now Kyiv, Ukraine), on May 25, 1889. He was the youngest of five children. His father, Ivan Alexeevich Sikorsky, was a professor of psychology in Saint Vladimir University (now Taras Shevchenko National University), a psychiatrist with an international reputation, and an ardent Russian nationalist. Igor Sikorsky was an Orthodox Christian. When questioned regarding his roots, he would answer: "My family is of Russian origin. My grandfather and other ancestors from the time of Peter the Great were Russian Orthodox priests." Sikorsky's mother, Mariya Stefanovna Sikorskaya (née Temryuk-Cherkasova), was a physician who did not work professionally. She is sometimes called Zinaida Sikorsky. While homeschooling young Igor, she gave him a great love for art, especially in the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci, and the stories of Jules Verne. In 1900, at age 11, he accompanied his father to Germany and through conversations with his father became interested in natural sciences. After returning home, Sikorsky began to experiment with model flying machines, and by age 12, he had made a small rubber band-powered helicopter. Sikorsky began studying at the Saint Petersburg Maritime Cadet Corps in 1903 at the age of 14. In 1906, he determined that his future lay in engineering, so he resigned from the academy, despite his satisfactory standing, and left the Russian Empire to study in Paris. He returned to the Russian Empire in 1907, enrolling at the Mechanical College of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. After the academic year, Sikorsky again accompanied his father to Germany in the summer of 1908, where he learned of the accomplishments of the Wright brothers' Flyer and Ferdinand von Zeppelin's rigid airships. Sikorsky later said about this event: "Within twenty-four hours, I decided to change my life's work. I would study aviation." By the start of World War I in 1914, Sikorsky's airplane research and production business in Kiev was flourishing, and his factory made bombers during the war. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Igor Sikorsky fled his homeland in early 1918, because the Bolsheviks threatened to shoot him for being "the Tsar's friend and a very popular person". He moved to France where he was offered a contract for the design of a new, more powerful Muromets-type plane. But in November 1918 the war ended, and the French government stopped subsidizing military orders, whereupon he decided to move to the United States. On March 24, 1919, he left France on the ocean liner Lorraine, arriving in New York City on March 30, 1919.
Aircraft designer
With financial backing from his sister Olga, Sikorsky returned to Paris, the center of the aviation world at the time, in 1909. Sikorsky met with aviation pioneers, to ask them questions about aircraft and flying. In May 1909, he returned to Russia and began designing his first helicopter, which he began testing in July 1909. Powered by a 25-horsepower (19-kilowatt) Anzani engine, the helicopter used an upper and lower two-bladed lifting propeller that rotated in opposite directions at 160 rpm. The machine could only generate about 357 pounds-force (1,590 newtons) of lift, not enough to lift the approximate 457 pounds (207 kg) weight. Despite his progress in solving technical problems of control, Sikorsky realized that the aircraft would never fly. He finally disassembled the aircraft in October 1909, after he determined that he could learn nothing more from the design. In February 1910, he undertook to build a second helicopter, and his first airplane. By the spring, helicopter No. 2 could lift its weight of 400 pounds (180 kg), but not the additional weight of an operator.
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