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Randy Cassingham's Honorary Unsubscribe Recognizes the Unknown, the Forgotten and the Obscure People who Had an Impact on Our Lives |
Frank Piasecki
 An inventor, in the 1940s Piasecki and some friends from his mechanical engineering classes at the University of Pennsylvania formed the PV Engineering Forum to build helicopters. Their company name didn't include the word "helicopter" because, he said, "people would have laughed." But he had good ideas, and Piasecki became "one of the three primary progenitors of the American helicopter industry," said Roger Connor, curator of vertical flight at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. "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." He not only invented the PV-2, an early helicopter, but also invented the tandem-rotor helicopter. The dual rotors gave the XHRP-X transport helicopter, or "Flying Banana", extraordinary lifting capability. The XHRP-X, which first flew in 1945, evolved into the Chinook, which can carry 30,000 pounds of cargo. Piasecki also invented the Helistat: an extra-large blimp and four helicopters all bolted to a large frame that could lift 25 tons -- the largest aircraft in the world (shown in photo). The prototype crashed in 1986 in Lakehurst, N.J., just a half-mile from where the Hindenburg crashed in 1937. He died at home on February 11 from a heart attack. He was 88.
From This is True for 10 February 2008 |
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