Helicopter In Action

The Danish inventor Jacob Ellehammer built the Ellehammer helicopter in 1912. It consisted of a frame equipped with two contra-rotating discs, each of which was fitted with six vanes around its circumference. After a number of indoor tests, the aircraft was demonstrated outdoors and made a number of free take-offs. Experiments with the helicopter continued until September 1916, when it tipped over during take-off, destroying its rotors.
• Early development
In the early 1920s, Argentine Raúl Pateras Pescara, while working in Europe, demonstrated one of the first successful applications of cyclic pitch. Coaxial, contra-rotating, biplane rotors could be warped to cyclically increase and decrease the lift they produced. The rotor hub could also be tilted forward a few degrees, allowing the aircraft to move forward without a separate propeller to push or pull it. Pescara was also able to demonstrate the principle of autorotation, by which helicopters safely land after engine failure. By January 1924, Pescara's helicopter No. 3 could fly for up to ten minutes.
One of Pescara's contemporaries, Frenchman Etienne Oehmichen, set the first helicopter world record recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) on 14 April 1924, flying his helicopter 360 meters (1,181 ft). On 18 April 1924, Pescara beat Oemichen's record, flying for a distance of 736 meters (nearly a half mile) in 4 minutes and 11 seconds (about 8 mph, 13 km/h) maintaining a height of six feet (2 m). Not to be outdone, Oehmichen reclaimed the world record on 4 May when he flew his No. 2 machine again for a 14-minute flight covering 5,550 feet (1.05 mi, 1.69 km) while climbing to a height of 50 feet (15 m). Oehmichen also set the 1 km closed-circuit record at 7 minutes 40 seconds.