Meeting Igor Sikorsky

First of all, there’s a funny story here.  It’s actually a prophetic story. Within the first few months that I joined Sikorsky, I was taking a course in drafting at the Bridgeport Engineering Institute and the question in my mind was, What would be the best studies to go through to help me move up at Sikorsky? One Saturday morning I was walking into the lobby of the Bridgeport plant, and who do I see? Well, Mr. Sikorsky. His back is to me, he was looking up at the clock and setting his watch as he always did.

I summon up the courage to tap him on the shoulder. He turned around and I said, “My name is Bill Paul. I just started going to school nights. Mr. Sikorsky, I’d like to understand, what would be the best subjects to study?” He spent about ten minutes with me talking about structures and dynamics and things of this nature and then we shook hands. Now, the thing that blew my mind downstream was how in the world would those two people, Mr. Sikorsky, the founder, and this young kid who has just started giving out supplies, how would he possibly know that someday I would run his engineering department and then run his whole company? Ain’t that an amazing story in a way?

Now there’s another one, when Mr. Sikorsky would come in to some meetings we would have, like presentations which were being made, and he would always sit in the back.  Everybody would always get up and force him to a front seat. The whole humility of the man was extraordinary.

Flight Testing the S-60 Skycrane with Igor Sikorsky

There’s another story of Mr. Sikorsky during this process when I was taking measurements of vibrations on the S-60 flying crane. Mr. Sikorsky’s thrust in life was to save lives and so he came up with the concept of the crane helicopter. This was after he had retired, but he was still there working as a consultant. He came up with the idea that he wanted to have a flying crane. What this is, it’s a cockpit attached to a beam that has a main and tail rotor on it, but nothing underneath, no fuselage, no cabin.

The idea was to be able to attach whatever cabin you want underneath that, for whatever issue, whatever problem you might have.  We also had a rear looking cockpit so if you want to use the hook to lift something up to the top of a building, the rear-facing pilot could see that very well.

But what Mr. Sikorsky really wanted was an air ambulance capability. He wanted to have what he called a people pod that could sit underneath the helicopter and you could take it to an accident site or to a fire site or whatever the emergencies might be, and have a mini operating room inside this people pod.

At that time I was measuring vibration. I got a call from the program manager and he said, ”We want you to fly on this flying crane.” Mr. Sikorsky would like to see what it’s like to be on a platform underneath the crane.  What the guys did was they built a platform with cables hooked up to the fuselage. They mounted four chairs, and Igor Sikorsky was there, as was Michael Gluhareff, the person who inherited his job and was running engineering, his old comrade, the program manager, and myself, and I had this vibration stuff, I was measuring vibrations.

We took off. Now here we are in the breeze about a thousand feet up. I was like about 22 years old, and I was rather awestruck with him and also awestruck at the fact that we had a platform. I was out there in the breeze by myself. Mr. Sikorsky gets up, and everybody said, “Don’t get up, Mr. Sikorsky.” He gets up, he starts looking around with his handkerchief, walking around with the vibration and stuff, and everybody was a little petrified.  Then he decided to come sit back down.

Then he said, “What I want to do is I want to get a people pod made out of plywood, but before we do, I need to get this vibration lower.” He turned to me and asked if I could make this vibration level lower.  Well, I said there’s one way of doing it. He’s quick, “I’m talking about this afternoon”. This gentleman was very determined.  I took a tube and two plates, and had them welded together so I had four tubes. I put bungee cords around these tubes, tied the ends together, put them in a test rig to be sure they could hold, and then we hooked up the whole platform to the helicopter, with it only being held up by bungee cords. The four of us were on bungee cords and flying again.

The vibration level went down. It was terrific. He said, “Okay, now what I want to do is I want to go back overnight and build the little people pod and hook up everything to that.” He wanted this kind of a mini ambulance. What happened next was we took off, again with the four chairs were mounted.  We got up in the air and the vibration of the floor was doing this. All four chairs were doing this. [Shaking his hands up and down at a fast rate].  I pointed out to Mr. Gluhareff, “We got to get him down.” He said, “No, no, he won’t change.” He kept on going for 30 minutes, no matter what happened. He wanted to see it, he wanted to feel it.  Then we landed. After we landed, I looked underneath, and they forgot to install the crossbeams under the seats.  We were sitting on four chairs on plywood tacked only to the ends.

How’s that for a story?  That was the way it was, it was – informality. If we wanted to get it done, he wanted to get it done, it was going to be done overnight. In a rush of doing things, these things do happen. It certainly wasn’t the formality that you see today at the company.

The Black Hawk Program Win

In 1972 the Army issued the request for proposal for the UTTAS. At that time there were four major helicopter companies. There was Boeing, Bell, Hughes and ourselves. For all of us, it was a must-win, but for Sikorsky it was a make-or-break situation because we were slowly going out of business.  The CH-53D production was gone, the S-61s were gone. We had no commercial aircraft at the time. On the horizon we had CH-53 Echoes coming down the line but that was too small a program to sustain Sikorsky as we knew it.  We were now a onesie-twosie shop. We became, at that point, almost a mod shop, a shop of overhaul and repair.

What had happened? The great Sikorsky was not in a favorable position? It was because of our history with the Army.  We had lost every single competition that the Army had in the 1960s for the Vietnam War. We lost the utility helicopter to Bell. That was the Bell Huey. We lost the Chinook heavy-lift helicopter, it was right in our wheelhouse, to Boeing Vertol. We lost the small scout helicopter to Hughes.  It became the OH-6.

If that wasn’t bad enough, a few years later, the Army came up wanting a high-speed helicopter, the AAFSS – the Advance Aerial Fire Support System.  It was a helicopter that would go like 220 knots, and we have a wing and single-rotor helicopter again, right in our wheelhouse. We lost that helicopter program to Lockheed, a company at that time that had never built a production helicopter. The reason why Lockheed won was because they had come up with a rotor system concept that was a rigid rotor, no bearings, no lubricants, no seals, and it was designed by Lockheed, but also supported by the United States Army. The Army loved it. It was almost like it was not only Lockheed’s rotor system, it was the Army’s rotor system.

When the competition came up and we proposed our helicopter, we had the 1945, 1955, 1960 concept of a flapping rotor with bearings, with dampers, with lubricants, aluminum rotor blades, and so on and so forth that frankly, they didn’t want.   Sikorsky was viewed by many as blacksmiths because we had proven technology that worked and we were reluctant to change.

We learned two lessons there. We didn’t have the technology, and also we were supporting our technology internally and we were not responding to the customers so that, in fact, our technology never became their technology. Those two lessons were the lessons we learned going forward.

The company was now hanging on the ability to have the technology necessary to win the UTTAS competition, and we were behind.  We were the underdogs   We had two years to get this thing done, and we didn’t have a moment to spare.

First, the corporation had to decide if we were even capable of winning this UTTAS competition?  Or, were we a company that was never going to win an Army contract? In their wisdom, the leaders of United Aircraft decided that they had to fix this company and they picked their chief of research and technology at the corporation, Wes Kuhrt, to come down as our president.

One of the things Wes had to do was to go to the Army and convince himself that in fact, we had a chance of winning this, given the history I just talked about. As a result of that, the Army gave him those assurances that we would not be judged on our past experience, we would just be judged by what we do now.

At Sikorsky Wes met Jack McKenna, who was really a hard-charging operating guy, and they picked Harry Jensen as their engineering manager. Harry Jensen was a guy approaching 60 years old, a strong, tough guy, but he knew everything that was going on with the engineering department and could lead it.

Those three guys basically transformed the company into a company that would be in a position to win the UTTAS competition. By 1970, this is a couple of years later, they had worked with the Army to let them know they really wanted this program. We weren’t sure we could win it. More likely than not, Bell and Boeing, who are Army contractors, would probably win, but Sikorsky decided to invest their own money in 1970 and get ready for the competition that would take place in 1972. That’s where I came in because what they were looking for was new technology. I had been in the technical area at this time. I was not in the design area.

Harry Jensen brought me in. He was the man who became my mentor and my father figure. He was the one who said, “Okay, Bill, you’ve got to develop this technology. You don’t have to be encumbered by what took place in the past.” At that point, he wanted a young guy. He wanted someone who was fresh, who could take a fresh look and not be involved with what might have been wrong in the past. Then I went out and found probably the smartest engineer I could find. His name was Bob Zincone and he became my sidekick.

He was my sidekick throughout the entire rest of this process. when I was the president, he was the vice president. After I was president he became president. Bob Zincone and I– well, I was no longer ”I”, it was “we” at that point.

Back in 1968 Wes recognized that the rotor system was a big part of this whole issue with Lockheed, and so he set up a design competition of two different designs within the company to see which one would win. One of those was a conventional design, what you see today as the Black Hawk helicopter.  The other was a design using the ABC, the XH-59A Advancing Blade Concept.

The reason for looking at the ABC was because the Army was so enamored with the Lockheed program which was a rigid rotor, that we wanted to see if a rigid rotor helicopter at that time could also be a contender. It certainly would be a great advancement. We had these two helicopter designs.  We set up a group of us to evaluate them, and we concluded that we could not go with the ABC at the time. It would just be too big a stretch. It was the conventional helicopter design that you see today, modified across 50 years, that we proposed for the UTTAS.

When Harry Jensen selected me to do the technology for the UTTAS, he also selected Ray Leoni to be the program engineering manager.  Harry took all the engineers and he put them under Ray in a place just for the UTTAS, and Ray would be responsible for the day-to-day activities of that group.. At the end, Ray put together the proposal which was rock solid to win this competition, and so he ended up also becoming program manager at some part in this competition. He played a very important role. Ray and I tend to say to each other, he was the designer and I was the technologist.