Russian-émigré engineer Igor Sikorsky flew his VS-300 for the first time, a spindly, open-frame aircraft tethered to the ground for safety. Though the flight lasted mere seconds, it validated the single main-rotor-with-tail-rotor configuration that remains the standard helicopter design nearly a century later.
Sikorsky had been obsessed with vertical flight since childhood in Kyiv, building an early helicopter model as a teenager that failed to fly. By the late 1930s, established as an American aircraft manufacturer, he returned to the dream with the VS-300, an ungainly contraption of tubes, wires, and an exposed engine that looked more like scaffolding than an aircraft.
On September 14, tethered by cables to keep it from spinning away, the machine lifted a few feet off the ground under Sikorsky's own hands at the controls—he insisted on testing his own designs personally, well into his sixties. Early tests revealed serious stability problems that took over a year of modification to solve, including the eventual addition of a single tail rotor to counter torque.
The configuration Sikorsky perfected became the template for the overwhelming majority of helicopters built since, from medevac choppers to presidential Marine One. He would later say the helicopter fulfilled a need 'no other flying machine' could: hovering, landing anywhere, and rescuing people trapped by disaster—a mission borne out repeatedly in the decades since.