Frank Nicholas Piasecki, A Pioneer In Helicopters, 88

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Frank Piasecki, a Pioneer in Helicopters, Is Dead at 88

By DENNIS HEVESI [New York TImes]

Frank Piasecki, an inventor of one of the first helicopters and the
first to develop a tandem-rotor helicopter -- the so-called Flying
Banana -- capable of carrying large cargo loads or troops into combat,
died Monday [February 11, 2008] at his home in Haverford,
Pennsylvania. He was 88.

The cause was a heart attack, his son John said.

In the early 1940s, Mr. Piasecki developed the PV-2, a small single-
seat helicopter with a three-blade rotor capable of a top speed of
about 25 miles per hour. When the PV-2 took off from a field outside
Philadelphia [Pennsylvania] on April 11, 1943, with Mr. Piasecki at
the controls, he became the second successful American helicopter
engineer. (Earlier models had been designed in France and Germany.)

"He was one of the three primary progenitors of the American
helicopter industry," Roger Connor, curator of vertical flight at the
Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, said in an
interview on Wednesday. "One is Igor Sikorsky, who developed the
modern helicopter and placed it in mass production. Another is Arthur
Young, who built the first commercially sold helicopter. And the third
was Piasecki."

That first flight by Mr. Piasecki was, in a way, more successful than
intended. When he stepped into the cockpit, Mr. Piasecki had only 14
hours of flight experience, in a small plane, a Piper Cub. The PV-2
was tethered to the ground by a clothes line and was supposed to rise
only a foot or two. "The line broke," Mr. Connor said, "and he was
free-flying this totally untried aircraft with no training."

Soon after, with about 10 hours of helicopter flight experience, Mr.
Piasecki attached the PV-2 -- tail first, and not on a trailer -- to the
back of his Studebaker and drove to Washington to demonstrate its
capabilities to War Department officials. But the helicopter wheels
had no bearings and rapidly heated.

"He had to stop the car every 10 to 15 minutes and splash some water
to cool them off," Mr. Connor said. "One time, he had to hop a fence
to get some water and was chased by a bull."

The demonstration was successful, and soon Mr. Piasecki's company, PV
Engineering Forum, which he started in 1940 with Harold Venzie, was
receiving government contracts. That led, in 1945, to Mr. Piasecki's
major breakthrough: the tandem-rotor XHRP-X transport helicopter.

While Sikorsky was the first American to develop a practical
helicopter, his early designs had only one engine beneath a single
rotor in front; any additional load to the rear could throw it off
balance. Mr. Piasecki's XHRP-X had two rotors, one in front and a
higher one in the rear. It was called the Flying Banana because of the
bend in its fuselage.

At just under 48 feet long with rotor diameters of 41 feet, the XHRP-X
was far larger than the early Sikorsky helicopters. By today's
standard, it was small, but at the time it was significant advance. It
could carry up to 6,500 pounds of cargo, or about 10 soldiers. Today,
the largest tandem-rotor helicopter, the Chinook, can carry up to
30,000 pounds or 44 passengers.

In 1946, the company's name was changed to the Piasecki Helicopter
Corporation, which later became the Rotocraft Division of the Boeing
Corporation. In 1955, Mr. Piasecki formed the Piasecki Aircraft
Corporation, in Philadelphia. By then, the company was challenging
Sikorsky as the predominant manufacturer of military helicopters.

An airplane "must have landing fields," Mr. Piasecki told The Saturday
Evening Post in 1957. "A truck needs roads; a train has to have
tracks. Even a ship needs wharves and channels. But a helicopter, all
a helicopter needs is a clearing."

Mr. Piasecki's company suffered a serious blow on July 1, 1986, when
one of his inventions, the Helistat, crashed in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
The Helistat was a 343-foot-long, 1-million-cubic-foot Dacron bag --
about five times the volume of a Goodyear blimp -- attached by an
aluminum frame to four helicopters. Designed for the United States
Forest Service, it was intended to transport 25 tons of lumber. The
crash, a half mile from the site of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937,
killed one of the pilots.

Frank Nicholas Piasecki was born in Philadelphia on October 25, 1919,
one of two sons of Nikodem and Emilia Lotocki Piasecki, immigrants
from Poland. His father was a tailor.

Besides his son John, Mr. Piasecki is survived by his wife of 49
years, the former Vivian O'Gara Weyerhaeuser; two daughters: Lynn
Cunningham and Nicole Heymann; four other sons, Frederick, Frank,
Michael and Gregory; and 13 grandchildren.

As a boy, Mr. Piasecki was assembled dozens of model airplanes. In his
teens, he worked for a company in Philadelphia that made autogyros, a
predecessor of the helicopter that looked like an airplane with a
rotor on top.

After studying mechanical engineering at the University of
Pennsylvania, Mr. Piasecki transferred to New York University where he
received a bachelor of science degree in 1940. In the fall of 1940,
with Mr. Venzie and several other friends from the University of
Pennsylvania, he started the PV Engineering Forum. They avoided using
the word "helicopter" in its name, he said, because "people would have
laughed."

There was another first in Mr. Piasecki's career. On October 20, 1943,
after his arrival in Washington to demonstrate the PV-2 to the
military, an inspector from the Civil Aeronautics Authority
(forerunner to the Federal Aviation Administration) asked to see his
commercial pilot's license. Mr. Piasecki did not have one.

"The inspector wrote out the nation's first helicopter license," Mr.
Connor said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/business/15piasecki.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin

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