The first I ever knew there was something called a helicopter I received a present of a bubble canopy, skeleton truss tail boom, two-bladed counter-balanced rotor, reciprocating flat configuration Bell. It was in silver plastic and well matched to the size of my hands. It had to be glued together with the thin metal ether tube, pin punctured spigot glue of that era. This type glue dissolved the surfaces and sort of welded them together. It did not like water. Everything stayed together pretty well through hard play except the rotor blades joint to the counterbalance rod. It would twist off the pad and fall off as I spun it. The predictive part as to my vocation was the two litters with windshield on the end that could be clipped to the struts going out to the skids. I could put my toy soldiers on these and airlift them to an aid station in an aeromedical role. The city library had books of Army gear that had pictures of Hiller helicopters that were similar except with a tubular tail boom. Later I got a kit of a smaller scale but larger in real life Sikorskiy with a multibladed rotor and a more complicated hub. It had a large radial aircraft type engine inside clamshell doors in the nose. There was a cargo door I could slide to put things inside. My toy soldiers were not small enough to go in this though it had figures for the pilot and copilot included in the kit. This was a USAF version and had decals to mark it. It had four wheels as landing gear. There is a similar one for the Army with a single tail wheel and a lower tail boom with outrigger main wheels. I’m trying to remember if I saw any helicopters in the movies or on TV before I moved to California in 1965. Did any fly over? My official opening with helicopters came in 1965 when I went to the Army recruiter to volunteer. He showed me a list of specialties I could be trained for and I picked out helicopter mechanic and fixed wing airframe welder. Then he told me that none of those schools was currently open. I would have to wait until September. Graduation came and I headed to the West Coast. One of the places I applied for a job was Lockheed’s Rye Canyon facility. It was brand new then. I found it’s address in the College Placement Annual I found at the Student Activities Building. When I got there the security staff set me up with Engineering on the Rigid Rotor Helicopter. We walked right past the transmission test rig which was running the tail and main rotor drives. The whirl rig was outside. I wanted to be on that program but was a little too off to the side with my degree in Physics. I remember exiting through the side door. On the way there, my car had skidded its rear axle sideways as I came to a blind right angle turn to the facility on a vacant road. The sintered iron shoes on my hot rod had Bendix style self-energizing while the front brakes were the older simple Lockheed style. This imbalance is what later led to early disk brake cars of that era having a compensator valve as the rear brakes required much less pressure to create friction. I thought I could do some good for Lockheed studying “coupling” in dynamics. Where I went to work my second project was to promote an Aeromedical version of the commercial Douglas DC-9 which had just flown and was in flight test. The patients were picked up in theater and then rode in a Lockheed USAF C-141 “Starlifter” back to the United States where they were to be flown to airfields near hospitals nearest their home towns. This involved sometimes two or more additional hops with the existing propeller airplanes which consisted of C-131 “Samaritan” twin engine aircraft and former Navy Operation Deep Freeze C-118 four-engine aircraft. This set up might take three additional days in the continental U. S. (CONUS). Burn Urgent patients had a separate routing on T-39 twin jets like modern executive jets. They all went to Brooks Army Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. This was all managed by Military Airlift Command (MAC) located at Scott, AFB in Belleville, Illinois. The USAF Surgeon General was also located there. I obtained data on monthly patient movements to create studies of how much money and time could be saved by using jet airlift. I also received data on airfield lengths, strengths, and facilities. After my team won this competition against Boeing’s 737 and the British Aircraft (BAC) 1-11 I worked with a manger who was working on his own outside with a partner on a personal helicopter they called Lift systems Incorporated. During working hours, we worked on other applications of the DC-9 and at lunch the manger would describe what he was doing and try to solve a theoretical block to his efficiency pitch. His helicopter had coaxial blades on a common mast driven by a small general aviation engine. NASA evaluated his design as having more solidity than a single blade and so the plot showed him as being equal when his blades were half as wide in chord. The design was one that had been used on a drone ASW helicopter on Navy destroyers and built by Bendix. Bendix was a subcontractor on the first win I had experienced at Douglas. The inventor of the design was a consultant to Lift Systems and he provided a much-updated design that used an automobile differential as the coaxial counterrotating drive. The rotor blades were custom fiberglass woven sox stiffened with epoxy resin. All went well until in a demonstration of how simple the design was to fly they used an untrained female. She tipped it over and the blades were destroyed. That ended the effort as making new blades was beyond the means of the two engineers. I followed the Lockheed Rigid Rotor in the news as it became the Army AH-56A “Cheyenne” armed helicopter to be used in Air Cavalry operations. I was not totally sold on this use in Viet Nam. The helicopters of that era were very noisy and I referred to them in limited thoughts never communicated as “flying commotion.” They needed some skills. The AH-56A began to demonstrate some very amazing skills such as making loops and barrel rolls as well as high speed transport. Then one crashed and the program began to wind down and was cancelled. A more immediate Armed helicopter appeared in the AH-1 “Cobra” using the Bell rotor system which had no hinges and instead used a counter balancing rod and as I learned later, a swash plate so the pilot flew the plate and it was linked to the rotor to fly the helicopter. All very amazing to the builder of the plastic kit so many years before. My most direct connection to helicopters came after 1970 when I moved into a new house next to Los Alamitos Naval Air Station which was being deactivated. The new tenants were Army Reserve and Army National Guard helicopters. I spoke at a public meeting seeking to close the base because it had once had an F-4 “Phantom” unit and one could be assigned again. The Phantoms used afterburner in takeoffs and the noise was now unacceptably loud in the houses that had been built nearby. I visited the airfield with other members of the College Park Homeowners Association of Seal Beach, California, Inc. board. I was the President at that time. My next job was in Florida at United Technologies Government Products Group, Pratt & Whitney Division. The Sikorskiy helicopter to replace the UH-1 Huey was being tested at the main plant airfield. There was to be a civilian version as well as an Army version. I had no direct tasks related to the helicopter and only evaluated some folded rotor concepts for airlift as part of the Rapid Reaction force and a complete airlift of the military to the Persian Gulf. This was part of a C-5 re-engining and rewinging at first and then a new STOL airlifter I had met in Long Beach, California as the YC-15 but now was being reevaluated as a C-141 replacement also. I never worked physically on helicopter hardware. The next time I saw a physical helicopter close-up was in 1998 at a Selfridge National Guard Base Open House and Air show. There I examined an AH-1J, and compared it to the UH-1’s and OH-6’s I had seen at Los Alamitos close-up. The Sikorskiy I had seen at the main plant one day in an employee reveal meanwhile had been used in an invasion of Granada while I was in Washington, DC in 1983. Radio Moscow had made an announcement that was repeated on my car radio after I had visited Radio Liberty. A major operation utilizing the UH-60 (the Sikorskiy helicopter’s official designation) came in the intervening years in Panama. I was embarrassed that the helicopters had dropped off their airborne troops too early approaching the shore and they ended up in water up to their waists and in mud. Eventually, Noriega was arrested after many hours of being bombarded by loud rock and roll after F-117 Stealth fighters tried first to use a 1000 lb. bomb on his head-quarters. My last act as an employee of McDonnell-Douglas was to call the Mesa Arizona plant where the new AH-64 “Apache” was being built and talk to security. Hughes was rapidly exiting businesses after the death of Howard Hughes. This kept my focus on armed helicopters until one day when C-17’s delivered some Apaches to Kosovo in the late 1990’s. Two helicopters promptly crashed in the steep mountains and that effort was cancelled operationally. Notoriety came to the UH-60 in Somalia when the incursion to arrest a terrorist leader named Aedid by amphibious landing was reversed by President Clinton. The Apache had it’s moments with RPG’s in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today, Afghanistan continues to be a theater for major helicopter operations.