The year 2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the rotorcraft … or does it?
On 13 November 1907, a helicopter designed and constructed by French inventor Paul Cornu took to the air. Well, it lifted the 260 kg of the machine and its pilot to the dizzy altitude of one foot for around 20 seconds. Cornu soon realised that the 27-hp engine wasn’t powerful enough to drive the big rotors, and the project didn’t go much further than a few test flights.
But a few months earlier, some other French inventors, the brothers Bregeut, had managed to get a tethered gyroplane-type machine off the ground.
Inventors were experimenting with different configurations and control methods. In 1912, a Danish pioneer, Jacob Ellehammer, built a helicopter with contra-rotating rotors and a cyclic pitch control, and managed a few short hops off the ground. But it was a decade later that a helicopter flew for more than a minute, when American George de Bothezat managed a two-minute flight under some sort of control.
Two years later, rudimentary helicopters in France were flying a one-kilometre round circuit.
Meanwhile, in Spain, the aircraft that many experts now claim was the first successful rotorcraft was proving its capability. Juan de la Cierva had been working on the autogiro, or gyrocopter, where the rotors are not powered, but revolve with forward movement of the aircraft, acting as a rotating wing.
On 9, or possibly 17, January 1923, the Cierva Autogiro C.4 made a successful flight
