"Father's Day" at the Paris Air Show
At a lecture hosted by Sikorsky Aircraft, the company that bears his late father Igor's name, Sergei Sikorsky today recalled attending the air show in the early 1950s, when it was first held at Le Bourget field, here in the northern suburbs of Paris. The show featured an appearance by Charles Lindbergh, who had made the airfield famous by landing at it in 1927, completing his historic trans-Atlantic flight. (Lindbergh and Igor Sikorsky had a long professional collaboration, beginning when Lindbergh was the first pilot of Sikorsky’s pathbreaking S-40 "flying boat.")
As Sergei tells the story, Lindbergh was interviewed at the show by a young reporter who was aware he was a famous man. But not quite recalling the source of Lindbergh’s celebrity, she asked the following immortal question: "Is this your first trip to Paris, Mr. Lindbergh?" Ah, yes, a reporter’s worst nightmare: when enthusiasm outstrips knowledge, resulting in public humiliation.
Sergei Sikorsky’s affecting presentation could not have been better timed, coming the day after Father’s Day. He described that "moment of transition" at age 16 when he realized that the man he knew as a father was known to the world as an immortal aviation pioneer: the inventor, among many other innovative aircraft, of the single-rotor helicopter—"considered impossible by all the reputable engineers of the time," Sergei said, putting deliciously ironic emphasis on the word "reputable."
His father, Sergei said, was most proud of the fact that the helicopter had become "a unique instrument for the saving of human lives." He estimated that "two millions lives have been saved by the helicopter." This is a testament to the ability of the helicopter to land in remote locations beyond the reach of roads and runways, thus making it the vehicle of choice to deal with natural disasters. Not to mention its well known ability to ferry the injured to medical care from battlefields and accident scenes. One of the slides he displayed showed the first public demonstration of a rescue hoist raising someone up into a hovering helicopter. The "someone" in the hoist? That was the young Sergei Sikorsky.
According to Sergei, his father was a great admirer of the Wright brothers, and not just for their inventiveness. He said that the brothers had figured out that aviation pioneers needed to know two things--the first being how to design and build aircraft, the second being how “to stay alive.” In what Sergei called three miraculous years, his father "taught himself how to design airplanes, taught himself how to build airplanes, and taught himself how to fly airplanes." Nowadays, of course, the species of self-taught pilots is vanishingly rare. On second thought, it always was a rare breed. Igor Sikorsky’s first five airplanes, his son said, lasted an average of five minutes in the air before they crashed. But his father was a survivor, and then some, dying in 1972 at the age of 83.