Born: United States of America
Primarily active in: United States of America

From Vertiflite Leadership Profile: Vertiflite, January/February 2025

Sergei Sikorsky, VP Special Projects (Retired)
Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin Company

Eldest son of aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky, Sergei Sikorsky celebrates his 100th birthday in February with a unique perspective on vertical flight. “To me, it is fantastic to think where we have gone with the helicopter,” he said. “I’ve seen it grow from 90 hp to something like 18,000 hp today. I have seen the helicopter advance from roughly a 1,000 lb gross weight to 80,000 lb gross weight. I have seen it grow from a tiny, daylight-only flying machine to a multi-engine, [Instrument Flight Rules] IFR-capable aircraft, and it never ceases to excite me and make me wonder at how much has been done in my lifetime as regards the helicopter.”

Sergei Sikorsky retired from Sikorsky Aircraft in June 1992 as Vice President of Special Projects, but he continues to attend industry events and revisit the Stratford, Connecticut, factory that bears his family name. “I was back there for the 100th Anniversary,” he noted. “I enjoy visiting there every time and checking up on the latest developments.”

Igor Sikorsky began development of his VS-300 (S-46) helicopter at in Stratford in 1939, and his son was one of the few to get a ride in the demonstrator. The junior Sikorsky joined the small VS-300 team around 1942. “My very first job was working in the experimental department,” he recalled. I helped cut little pieces of lead pipe and weld them together to build a mockup of a small, two-seat helicopter — it never reached project status. My other job was to sweep out the experimental shop floor just before quitting time.”

Hands-on helicopter experience earned Sergei Sikorsky a wartime role in the development of the production R-4 (S-47). “When I was still working at Sikorsky and helping to push the VS-300 in and out of the hangar and wiping it down before and after the flights, I met a number of people. One of them who impressed me was Lt. Cdr. Frank Erickson of the Coast Guard. When I became close to being drafted, he asked if I would be interested in working for the Coast Guard. I said ‘definitely.’” Erickson stood up a helicopter training base at US Coast Guard Air Station Brooklyn in November 1943 with R-4s (HNS-1s). He piloted the first public demonstration of a helicopter rescue hoist in the summer of 1944 with young Aviation Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class Sergei Sikorsky on the hook.

After the war, Sergei Sikorsky joined Sikorsky Aircraft parent corporation United Aircraft Corp. (UAC) — later known as United Technologies Corp. (UTC) and today part of RTX Corp. — to help sell bigger, more-capable helicopters to a global market. In March 1972, he was named vice president of the German CH-53G co-production program. In December 1976, Sergei Sikorsky was executive assistant to the division senior vice president of marketing when the YUH-60A (S-70) won the US Army competition for the Utility Tactical Transport Aircraft System (UTTAS) — today’s Black Hawk.

Sikorsky recalled, “The day we won the competition, a number of us went to the local watering hole to celebrate, and as we were toasting each other and the Black Hawk, we began to calculate how many of these aircraft we could build. We thought with luck the Army could hold to its original requirement for 1,400 machines. If we were lucky and won Navy orders for the Seahawk and sold a few overseas, we could see a total production of 2,000, maybe 2,200 units. We recently celebrated 5,000 of these machines built. It was an interesting job just seeing how the Black Hawk was modified into a family of excellent machines.”

Family Business
Sergei Sikorsky was born in 1925 in New York City, where his Russian-speaking pilot-engineer father had emigrated in 1919. Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corp. was formed on Long Island in 1923 to build the S-29A passenger airplane. The company grew profitable in Connecticut making flying boats and amphibians, and young Sergei was inevitably drawn to an aviation career. “We moved from New York to Connecticut when I was about three-and-a-half or four years old, so you could say I grew up in and around Stratford. That’s where I went to school and where I, when I reached 16, started working at Sikorsky Aircraft during the day. I finished high school with night classes. It was pretty tough, but when you’re very young and know you’re going to get drafted, you try to get in and finish your high school — which I did — and get in a year or so of practical work at the factory — which I did.”

With demand for flying boats in decline, Igor Sikorsky revisited his long-time dream of the helicopter. His son observed, “The first times were sort of 1935–1936 when he began to make a few sketches of the helicopter. About 1937, the sketches were fairly well-advanced at home. Dad hired me, and for something like five dollars I would hand-carve out of balsa a helicopter fuselage and make rotor blades and wheels to make a little model of the helicopter. I made one or two of them, and I understand that dad would use them to talk to his early engineers when he began to seriously promote the idea of the helicopter.”

Sergei Sikorsky offered, “You have to understand that there was some skepticism even among Sikorsky engineering staff because the helicopter was — many people considered it — impossible to build. Others thought that even if you did build it, no one would find a practical use for it. It was in December of 1938 that Dad had this famous conference with the board of directors of United Aircraft and sold them on the idea of building a research helicopter. In January 1939, work started on what would be the VS-300.”

Sergei Sikorsky graduated from the private University School boys’ school in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1943 and joined the Coast Guard just as the service received the first production R-4 helicopters. He recalled, “After I survived basic training — boot camp — and was assigned to Floyd Bennett Field [in Brooklyn, New York], my first job was quite literally being a line mechanic on the very first R-4s. A training school was set up, and I remember I was then drafted to make several drawings of the VS-300 components and general layout because we had no maintenance manuals for the R-4s. We were sort of creating the maintenance manuals as the aircraft were delivered to us.”

Sikorsky added, “There was an interesting development when Commander Frank Erickson kind of intuitively thought of the idea of a rescue hoist. The electrically powered hoist at that time was very unsatisfactory. It was a very weak hoist; often a slippage would occur with the magnetic brake, and you would slide down, willingly or unwillingly. Shortly after that, we received an experimental hydraulic pump, and with the hydraulic pump installed, the hoist suddenly became very, very effective, very fast. The winching-up speed of the hoist was critical because the R-4 was already underpowered. The hydraulic hoist improved the winching speed, which meant that the helicopter could move out of the hover quicker into forward flight, generating significantly more lift.”

Peacetime opened new possibilities for the young veteran. Sergei Sikorsky explained, “I didn’t want to burden my father with a college education. I was eligible for the GI Bill, but at that time there was a waiting time of two, sometimes three, years to get into a university in the United States because all of the armed forces were releasing soldiers, sometimes thousands a day, all of them applying for the GI Bill. I got a letter from a friend who said he had just visited his relatives in Italy. All of the Italian universities were asking for students, and you could live like a god for $75 a month! I always loved drawing and art, so I went off to Italy, supposedly for one year, and ended up being so attracted by the University of Florence that I ended up studying there for four years.”

Sikorsky turned his fine arts degree to business. “Indirectly, while in Italy in the university, I did something that impacted my career: I learned Italian, I learned German and I learned French. When I finished the University of Florence and returned to the United States, I applied for a job at United Aircraft Export Corp. I hoped my knowledge of three or four languages, the fact that I had picked up an Italian pilot’s license and a Swiss pilot’s license, and the fact that I had three years’ experience as a helicopter mechanic at Floyd Bennet Field would enhance my resume.”

An application to Joe Barr, president of United Aircraft Export Corp. (a subsidiary of UAC), won Sikorsky a one-year probation in Hartford. “The next thing I knew, I was being assigned to Germany. It was an interesting period in 1951 when Germany was still occupied and divided. Aviation was totally forbidden. The very far-sighted president of the Export Corp. said, ‘There’s no way of keeping Germany down. I want you to go to Germany, establish yourself in Germany and start looking around to see who the future leaders are in the German aircraft industry.’” Fringe assignments took Sikorsky to France and Switzerland, but, “Primarily, I was in Germany, where I had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with a number of German aviation pioneers, such as Professor Henrich Focke, Claudius Dornier, Hanna Reitsch, Adolf Galland, Erich Hartmann and many others.”

After a year in Germany, “I got a phone call from Joe Barr saying, ‘Sergei, we’re running into some political headwinds in Japan. We’ve just about finished negotiating a Sikorsky license agreement with Mitsubishi. It's a question of prestige, and you represent the Sikorsky name. Get your tail into Japan; find out what’s wrong and fix it.’”

Sergei Sikorsky recalled, “I’m proud to say I was able to eliminate one or two political roadblocks in Japan and Mitsubishi was given a green-light to build the Sikorsky S-55. Mitsubishi still today operates a Sikorsky license and builds a variety of Sikorsky helicopters.”

The corporate troubleshooter returned to Germany in 1955, just before the formal end of the Allied occupation. “That’s when I started to wear a Sikorsky hat, a Pratt & Whitney hat, and once in a while a Hamilton Standard hat,” with each company a different business unit of UAC. Sergei Sikorsky supported different business teams. “The Germans bought a squadron of [Piasecki] H-21s and a squadron of Sikorsky H-34s, and started a two-year test and evaluation program — a competition between Piasecki and Sikorsky to see who would get the main order for 140-or-so helicopters. The French and British were also trying to sell their programs. I learned that international marketing is maybe 80% technical and at least 20% diplomatic.”

Vertical lift capability was also growing. Sergei Sikorsky noted, “As we were winning the H-34 versus H-21 competition in Germany, the Germans were creating a requirement for a super-heavy-lift helicopter. We immediately proposed a new turbine-powered helicopter, the Flying Crane. It’s not too well known that the German government funded the first two prototype S-64 helicopters. We won a design competition and built the two for Germany and a third for ourselves. We campaigned that third helicopter and eventually won a US Army contract” for what was designated as the CH-54 Tarhe.

The German government meanwhile scaled back its requirement for a super-heavy-lift helicopter. “Originally, they wanted to buy the Chinook,” acknowledged Sikorsky. “We had just barely flown the prototype CH-53. As I finished the flying crane marketing campaign, the campaign between the Chinook and Sikorsky CH-53 and the French Super Frelon started bubbling and boiling all over Germany. It lasted through about eight years of intense marketing and technology development, but eventually we won the German heavy-lift requirement with the CH-53. I was involved in that coproduction program, and we built 110 CH-53s in Germany for German Army Aviation.”

Interpreter, Ambassador
In June 1970, Sergei Sikorsky, became UAC’s international director for Europe. In October 1972, he briefed German aviation writers and other media on the agile S-67 Blackhawk attack helicopter. Sikorsky was based at VFW-Fokker in Speyer, Germany, from 1972 to 1974 for CH-53 coproduction and then moved to Bonn. United Aircraft Corp. became United Technologies Corp. in 1975. Sergei Sikorsky recalled, “I didn’t report back to Sikorsky Aircraft directly until I finished the last of my European assignments — the coproduction program of the CH-53 in Germany. My job became very interesting because there were trips to Japan, to China, to India, to a half-dozen other countries. I was traveling around the world, enjoying life and talking helicopters.”

Paris and Farnborough airshows enabled Sergei Sikorsky to talk to Russian helicopter makers and translate for press interviews. “I was struck by the respect and admiration that these Russian aeronautical engineers had for my father. Politically, he may have been ostracized and sort of a non-person, but as far as the Russian engineers and pilots were concerned, he was very much alive, and they were very, very proud of him.”

Sergei reflected, “I remember talking about helicopters and helicopter history with Dad. In his estimation, credit had to be given to Juan de la Cierva for his Autogiro work, also to Harold Pitcairn who did so much for the Autogiro in the United States. In Dad’s opinion, the first truly practical helicopter was built in Germany by Professor Focke in 1937. Whenever I talked to him about helicopter pioneers, he was always trying to say, ‘Yes, I can take credit for the single-main-rotor helicopter, but there were so many other people ahead of me.’ This was typical Igor Sikorsky, who was in retrospect a very modest man.”

Sergei Sikorsky continues to watch helicopter history unfold. “Obviously, there’s a push for longer range and higher cruising speeds for the helicopter — the helicopter is being driven by political and military requirements. I would think the helicopter will see a branch powered by some form of electricity, but my personal opinion is that’s quite a ways down the road. The bigger ones are going to be conventionally gas-turbine powered.

“I feel very strongly that one should not forget the hovering capability of the helicopter. Higher speeds would be easier with a fixed wing rather than a rotary wing. I believe, however — and this comes from an old hoist candidate — that nothing will take the place of a helicopter with a fairly low disk loading, which will allow you to hover over untrained, panic-stricken people in the water or a mountaintop. I can foresee the day when a drone helicopter with relatively low disk loading could become the primary plane-guard helicopter on aircraft carriers and elsewhere.”

Sergei Sikorsky acknowledged the value of the American Helicopter Society, today’s Vertical Lift Society, in advancing helicopter technology. “Forum technical sessions are always interesting and educational. The chance to see old friends and talk shop with my fellow helicopter enthusiasts is a very important part of the programs I go to. The Society is a chance for me to catch up with what’s happening around the corner and in the other fellow’s hangar.”