The Helicopter Is 110 Years Old. Will Self-Driving and Electric Power Turn It Into an Air Taxi? | QDaily Business History

In 1950s New York, a handful of helicopter routes once ran like bus lines.

Donald Trump's first year as US president did not go smoothly. Most of the White House staff he started with had left, the courts had struck down his travel-ban orders again and again, and the tax bill was crawling through Congress.

But a business dream of his from more than two decades earlier had unexpectedly come true: skipping the traffic and taking a helicopter from downtown to catch a flight at the airport.

In 1989 Trump bought an airline, renamed it Trump Shuttle, and began flying short helicopter hops between Manhattan's business district and LaGuardia Airport. The slogan was "Six minutes from Wall Street to the airport."

Trump was 43 that year, and had been showing an interest in politics for only two years. His aviation business did not go as far as his political career would: Trump Shuttle ran out of road three years after it launched, leaving the future president with $135 million in debt.

Helicopter "commuting" became real once Trump took office as president.

Whenever Trump travels outside Washington, he boards Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base. He lifts off from the South Lawn of the White House aboard Marine One, the presidential helicopter, and reaches the base in under 10 minutes. By car, even with the Secret Service clearing the way, that trip takes at least 30 minutes.

As it happens, Trump Shuttle's helicopters were Sikorsky S-61s. Twenty-seven years later, Marine One would be a modified SH-3 Sea King — the military version of the S-61.

It has now been 110 years since the Frenchman Paul Cornu made the first successful helicopter test flight, in 1907.

In those 110 years, a string of companies, Trump Shuttle among them, have tried to turn the helicopter into a fast way to commute across a city. Every one of them failed. Flying by helicopter is still a privilege of the rich and powerful.

Today most helicopters serve in the military, or with specialized agencies such as fire and police departments.

Now, as drone and electric technology matures, a new crop of companies is selling a new future for flying: Uber says hailing a flight will one day be as easy as hailing a taxi; Airbus says its future drones will be little different from today's remote-control toys; and the Chinese carmaker Geely has bought a flying-car startup and says it will put people in the air by 2020.

Helicopters work on the same principles as airplanes, and like airplanes they were born of the internal combustion engine

A helicopter works much the way a fixed-wing airplane does. It has at least two rotor blades, shaped much like an airplane wing. The blades travel in a circle around a shaft, just as a fixed-wing airplane pushes forward through the air, and that motion generates the lift that takes the aircraft up.

Humans copied vertical flight from nature long before biomimicry existed as a field. One early example is the "bamboo dragonfly" described in the Baopuzi 《抱朴子》, written by Ge Hong in China's Jin dynasty: three rotor blades, a wooden shaft, powered by a loop of ox hide.

In the 1480s the painter and inventor Leonardo da Vinci sketched an imagined vertical-takeoff machine. In his drawing of the "aerial screw," the "helicopter" has no rotor blades at all — lift comes from a helix of cloth. He pictured the machine wound up by a coiled spring, strong enough to carry one person into the air.

In 1861 the French inventor Gustave de Ponton d'Amécourt coined the word "helicopter," meaning "spiral wing." Before and after that, many engineers tried to design such a machine, but steam engines were too bulky and internal combustion engines were not yet good enough, so none of these helicopters ever left the ground.

In 1878 the Italian Enrico Forlanini built an unmanned helicopter driven by a steam engine. It rose 12 meters and hovered for 20 seconds, fed by a hose from the ground, with nobody aboard.

Thomas Edison had a hand in the effort too. He helped set up a $1,000 fund to reward whoever managed to build a working helicopter. His own prototype never got off the ground, and an accident during a power test burned one of his workers.

In 1907, four years after the Wright brothers' Flyer made the first powered flight, the Frenchman Paul Cornu climbed into a helicopter he had designed and built himself and, for the first time, lifted steadily off the ground. That machine is generally recognized as the birth of the helicopter.

It had two rotors, each 6 meters across, mounted side by side and turning in opposite directions to cancel out the torque and hold the aircraft steady in the air. Power came from a 24-horsepower gasoline engine built by the French firm Antoinette, with the pilot seated behind the engine, between the two rotors.

But Cornu's helicopter only ever hovered off the ground. It could not actually be flown under control.

On November 13, 1907, Cornu took it about 2 meters up and stayed there for less than a minute. Later research showed the aircraft was missing the controls it needed: it had no way to turn, and no way to head in any particular direction.

After that successful flight, Cornu abandoned the design and never got any further with helicopters. He made his living mainly building bicycles.

The autogyro went into service before the true helicopter did:

The difference between an autogyro and a helicopter is that no engine drives the autogyro's rotor. The aircraft has a separate propeller for forward thrust, and the airflow of that forward motion spins the rotor, which generates lift as it turns.

An autogyro is simpler than a helicopter and cannot take off or land vertically, but it handles low speeds better than a fixed-wing airplane does.

The world's first helicopter with mature, controllable performance — the German Focke-Wulf Fw 61, born in 1936 — was designed on the principles of the Cierva C.30 autogyro.

The Fw 61 looked quite unlike the helicopters common today. It had two three-blade rotors side by side, a fuselage adapted from another fixed-wing aircraft, the Fw 44, and a propeller on the nose just like a fixed-wing plane.

In fact the aircraft drew its power and its control from the rotors. The nose propeller mainly cooled the engine at low speed and in the hover, and supplied only a small share of the forward thrust.

The Fw 61's performance won praise from the German military. It could take off and land vertically, with a top speed of 112 kilometers per hour, a range of 230 kilometers and a service ceiling of 3,400 meters. But in the Second World War that followed, the newborn helicopter was judged unfit for combat. Both the Fw 61 and the more advanced Fa 223 were used only for reconnaissance, transport and medical evacuation, and neither was fielded on any scale.

The shape of the modern helicopter was fixed in the 1940s; the hardest problem has always been control

President Trump's Marine One is a modified Sikorsky Sea King.

Sikorsky is one of the most important helicopter manufacturers in the world, and its founder, Igor Sikorsky, is considered the inventor of the modern helicopter.

Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky was born in 1889 in the Russian Empire, in what is now Kyiv, Ukraine. After university he went to work as an engineer on fixed-wing aircraft design during the First World War, which began in 1914.

In 1917 Sikorsky was persecuted in Russia's Bolshevik Revolution and fled to France, where he kept building aircraft. But the war ended in 1919 and no government was funding the aircraft industry any more, so he emigrated to the United States.

There he took on an order from the US military: the first practical military helicopter.

Sikorsky's VS-300 pioneered the "single main rotor with tail rotor" layout, which is still in use and remains the most widely adopted helicopter design.

In that layout, the helicopter has a streamlined cabin with one large rotor on top, the number of blades varying by model. An engine drives the rotor — before the 1950s usually an internal-combustion piston engine, after that mostly a turboshaft. Through a transmission, the same engine also drives a small propeller mounted vertically at the tail, called the tail rotor.

The tail rotor was an important invention. In any helicopter driven by a main rotor, the turning rotor naturally produces a torque that tries to spin the fuselage; with nothing to counter it, the body would keep turning. The tail rotor cancels that torque out.

But a single rotor plus a tail rotor is the simpler arrangement. Since the VS-300, almost every helicopter has used much the same set of controls. Between the pilot's legs is the cyclic control stick — the cyclic pitch stick, in military usage — which tilts the plane of the main rotor in any direction, much like tilting an open umbrella. The helicopter then leans and moves the way the stick was pushed while the nose keeps pointing where it was.

Beside the pilot's seat is the collective pitch control lever, which looks like a car's handbrake and is called the collective stick in military usage. It sets the engine's speed and the pitch angle of the rotor blades, so the rotor can produce more or less lift and the aircraft climbs or descends.

At the pilot's feet are two anti-torque pedals, called the rudder pedals in military usage, which mainly control how hard the tail rotor pushes. That lets the pilot use the aircraft's own torque to swing the fuselage around and point the nose where he wants it.

In short, a helicopter pilot needs both hands and both feet working together to keep the machine flying smoothly. On modern helicopters a computer handles some of this automatically, which takes some of the load off the pilot, but the principle is unchanged.

Flying a fixed-wing airplane is simpler by comparison. Pilots use their hands and feet there too, but the great majority of fixed-wing aircraft settle into a naturally stable state as soon as they are in the air. It is like driving on a highway: hold the stick, keep the heading. A helicopter is an unstable object that may head off in an unexpected direction at any moment — more like riding a bicycle, which takes constant correction to stay upright.

Helicopters improved a great deal after that, but safety and the cost of learning to fly them held their use back

Today's helicopters perform well enough. The fastest in the world is the Westland WG.13 Lynx, which set a helicopter speed record of 400.86 kilometers per hour in 1986.

Most helicopters cruise at around 300 kilometers per hour — the famous Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk, for instance, cruises at 301 — while airplanes with turboprop engines, which work on similar principles, cruise at 500 kilometers per hour at the very least.

For a helicopter flying in a straight line, unbothered by roads, 300 kilometers per hour is enough to leave any car in the city behind.

There is also a structural variant that has diverged so far that the US Federal Aviation Administration no longer counts it as a "helicopter" but as a "short takeoff and vertical landing aircraft": the Boeing-Bell V-22 Osprey tiltrotor.

It has two turboshaft engines mounted side by side, driving two fairly small three-blade rotors. On takeoff the rotors point up and the aircraft rises like a helicopter. The two engines can rotate together, swiveling forward as the aircraft climbs, until it settles into the posture of a conventional airplane, with the wings then doing most of the lifting.

The V-22 can do what no other helicopter can: carry up to 9 tons, cruise at more than 440 kilometers per hour, and fly more than 1,600 kilometers. No ordinary helicopter comes close.

From the original Sikorsky VS-300 to today's Osprey, the basic principles of the helicopter have not changed, but the technology underneath has come a very long way.

Today's helicopters still take pedals and stick working together, but the process is now computer-assisted. Take the V-22: when the pilot moves the cyclic stick between his legs, the aircraft still changes direction and attitude, but a computer now coordinates the rudder, engine thrust and rotor blade pitch to make it happen.

One thing has not changed: helicopter safety.

A helicopter's great advantage over a fixed-wing aircraft is vertical takeoff and landing. That lets it work anywhere with a patch of open ground, in places a fixed-wing plane cannot use at all — hovering at any height above a target, landing on a mountaintop, even flying backward, to carry out rescues, deliver people and equipment, or watch a fixed point.

At the same time, flying close to the ground puts a helicopter in more danger than a fixed-wing aircraft. In civilian use it can easily strike trees, buildings and power lines. In military use its missions are mostly flown low, so a crew in trouble has no room to open a parachute. Flying near the ground also means more complicated aerodynamics: ground effect, vortex ring state, blade stall, tail rotor failure. When one of those hits, the helicopter is hard to control and can only come down.

During the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, a US special forces helicopter crashed — not because it met resistance, but because the heat and the compound's high walls disturbed the airflow from its rotor while it hovered. Its pilot was a veteran of many missions, and the helicopter still lost control and was forced down.

The military can absorb accidents and casualties. Civilian aviation cannot: one bad crash can destroy a business.

The helicopter commuter service that began in the 1950s was destroyed by three fatal crashes

In 1956 a New York company called New York Airways tried a helicopter commuter service, with scheduled flights running straight from Manhattan to New York's JFK Airport.

New York's two airports sat far from the city center, and the service was aimed at people who needed to get from downtown to a terminal fast. This "flying bus" ran several times a day, took just 10 minutes end to end, and was fairly cheap — about $40 in today's money.

In the 1960s, as new heliports went up on Manhattan Island, New York Airways' helicopters began landing at the heliport on the East River pier, a stone's throw from Lower Manhattan and Wall Street. In 1964 there were 32 helicopter flights a day from JFK to Newark Airport, and 33 a day back into the city.

It did not last.

On October 14, 1963, a New York Airways Boeing BV 107-II Vertol tandem-rotor helicopter suffered a mechanical failure and crashed while flying from JFK by way of Wall Street to Newark, killing six people.

On May 16, 1977, a New York Airways Sikorsky S-61L tipped over while parked at the rooftop heliport of the Pan Am Building in Midtown Manhattan. Its turning rotor killed four people on the spot, and a blade that broke away fell to the street and killed a pedestrian. The rooftop heliport was closed for good after the accident.

On April 18, 1979, another New York Airways Sikorsky S-61L lost its tail rotor taking off from Newark and fell 45 meters to the ground, killing three people and seriously injuring 13.

A month after that crash, New York Airways filed for bankruptcy.

Trump Shuttle later tried to restart the business. In 1989 it began running scheduled flights between LaGuardia Airport and Wall Street with three Sikorsky S-61s and two Boeing 234 tandem-rotor helicopters, nine flights a day at $199 a seat.

Then Trump ran into the oil-price spike brought on by the 1990 Gulf War — jet fuel comes from oil too — and in 1992, after poor results, Trump Shuttle was bought, renamed, and the flights stopped.

With self-driving technology and electric cars arriving, a new batch of companies is reimagining the flying commute

In 2016 Uber announced a flying-car program called Uber Elevate, meant to offer "flying taxi" service between downtown and the suburbs. In April 2016 Uber said its flying vehicles would reach Dubai and Dallas by 2020; in November 2017 it announced Los Angeles as well, and said it planned to work with NASA on a traffic-management system for "air taxis."

What Uber's flying car will actually look like is still anybody's guess. But judging by the companies doing similar work, it will have to be some kind of pilotless electric helicopter.

Last year the aviation giant Airbus unveiled a plan for a self-flying air taxi called Vahana, along with concept images. The aircraft would have eight electric propellers mounted on two sets of tiltrotors. It would carry one person, take off vertically, swing its motors forward for level flight, then land vertically again. In an emergency it would fire out a parachute to carry the passenger down.

The German startup Volocopter has gone further. In September it held a test flight in Dubai with a machine that looked like an oversized remote-control toy, fitted with 18 rotor blades, able to fly 30 minutes at 30 miles per hour.

Against a failure in flight the aircraft also carries a backup battery, and for the worst case there is a parachute on board for the passenger. The company has raised €25 million so far.

Chinese companies are moving here too. In July, Geely said it would buy the American flying-car company Terrafugia, and last week the two formally signed the acquisition agreement. The deal did not disclose a price, but it did announce the new company's appointments and product plans. Geely said it would give Terrafugia's flying-car program its full support.

Terrafugia, the company Geely bought, launched a flying car back in 2014. It looked like a short, stubby version of a small private plane, except that the wings folded and the body shrank down far enough to drive on the road.

That flying car still needs a takeoff run — in other words, it is really just a small electric airplane. Terrafugia's vision is to launch, within a few years, a vertical-takeoff flying car much like the ones Uber and Airbus are working on. Its website lists all sorts of specifications for that planned vehicle, but stays vague on the part that matters most: what will power it.

Companies are back in this field because of new technology. The first piece is electrification.

In the past, nearly all helicopters used turboshaft engines. They are powerful and reasonably efficient, but enormously loud, and they need frequent maintenance by trained specialists. The "flying car" concepts from Uber, Airbus and others use electric motors instead, which could fix that.

Electric motors are far smaller, lighter and quieter than turboshafts — the gap is as obvious as the one between a DJI remote-control drone and a jet airliner. The loudest sound an electric drone can make is its blades beating the air.

Because electric motors are smaller, tomorrow's "flying cars" can be smaller and simpler than today's helicopters while carrying more rotors and more motors. A helicopter used to have two rotors at most: with turboshaft transmissions, the more rotors, the more complicated the machine. Electric motors do not have that problem — every rotor can have its own motor. Many prototypes on show already have four rotors, eight, or more.

That solves part of the helicopter's safety problem. With enough rotors, one motor failing is no longer a "Black Hawk Down" disaster; the aircraft can still land safely.

Meanwhile, progress in self-driving technology wipes out the problem of training helicopter pilots.

A helicopter used to need at least one pilot, and with helicopter pilots scarce, that alone was a problem — and human senses may not be well suited to flying through a city packed with buildings. But better computers could let tomorrow's electric helicopters fly with nobody at the controls; passengers would only have to type in an address.

But "flying cars" still will not turn up in your life any time soon

The most basic problem is the battery. At this stage the battery problem is nowhere near solved even for electric cars. Most settle for a compromise range of about 300 kilometers, balancing charging time against battery weight. A few, Tesla among them, fit big batteries to guarantee the range.

On an aircraft, though, piling on batteries is simply not an option. In a car, extra batteries only make the motor spend more power when accelerating, dragging that weight along. In flight, battery weight counts for far more.

So far no company has offered any guarantee on range. Flights can run into weather, and batteries perform worse in winter. In a city the size of Beijing, a range under 150 kilometers means a flight to the airport basically cannot count on getting back. And big batteries charge slowly. If the aircraft has to recharge after carrying two passengers once, it can only fly a few times a day, which sends costs straight up.

The accident on top of the Pan Am Building also shows how heavy the responsibility is for flying vehicles in a city, since any accident may hit pedestrians or buildings.

Uber and others say future flying vehicles will all have propellers and will be able to land safely, but once something goes wrong these machines still have to come down, and a vertical-takeoff aircraft has very little room for error. An accident in a city dense with buildings would be a disaster.

The other problem is cost.

Trump Shuttle's failure in the 1990s proved one thing: time is not worth that much. Even in a city like Manhattan, Wall Street bankers did not particularly need to save an hour on the way to the airport.

They need it even less now. With everyone online and WiFi spreading even to airplanes, people mind commuting time less than ever.

But electrifying the helicopter could help some industries that already fly them.

Law enforcement might use electric helicopters to change how fast it responds. Every city has a heavily armed special police unit for violent crime, but traffic makes it hard for them to reach a scene at once. Mostly they drive around the city on patrol and hope for the best.

A few cities — London, which lives with the threat of terrorist attacks, among them — now use V-22 Ospreys to move Army special forces against terrorist attacks. But that is very expensive: an hour in the air costs $83,000 on average. They will not scramble for an ordinary violent incident, even one where lives are at risk.

Take away the pilot and the heavy maintenance bill, and police dropping out of the sky as they do in Minority Report, always reaching the scene at once like Batman, becomes possible.

Medical transport used to be one of the main jobs of civilian helicopters. In the future, cheap electric helicopters — cheaper because they save on pilots and maintenance crews — could spread to many more hospitals.

Today perhaps only a heart-transplant patient is willing to pay a great deal to "enjoy" helicopter medical service. In the future, people badly hurt in city car crashes might also be rushed to a hospital fast enough to save their lives.

These are all organizations that can bear a higher cost to buy time.

But commuting around traffic every day is not something to count on until battery technology makes some kind of breakthrough.

Cover image/US Air Force