Ricker WINGS #5

#3. What role did the helicopter play in the development of aviation technology?

Believe it or not, the helicopter is not a recent invention, says Tom Crouch in his book Wings.  In fact, it has played a pivotal role in aviation technology several times – even before the first airplane was invented!  As far back as the 15^th century, there is evidence of a flying toy – an early helicopter (Crouch 25).  Various versions popped up over the years, but the Wright brothers’ father bought them a toy helicopter when they were young boys, and this stimulated their desire to invent a flying machine, thus connecting it as a direct influence on the first airplane (Crouch 26).  In the 1920s, engineers found a way to place an airplane body under a rotor assembly to make an “autogiro” (Crouch 465).  Juan de la Cierva, the Spanish engineer credited with inventing the autogiro, notes aviation historians, “deserves recognition as one of the great innovators in the history of rotary-wing flight” (Crouch 466).  But these autogiros were largely unstable because they were hard to balance.  Many inventors worked to refine and improve the design, though, and by WWII helicopters were a valued part of the military and had entered the realm of every kid’s sci-fi dreams.  Inventors considered the possibilities of domestic uses for helicopters and began to devise ways to make the machines less weighty and more maneuverable.  When the turboshaft engine was invented for the helicopter, it “provided a revolutionary jump in performance and marked the single most important turning point in the history of rotary-wing flight” (Crouch 472).  This, in turn, impacted military uses – particularly in rescue missions and dropping personnel into tight or inhospitable locations.  They are now used (as early dreamers had foreseen) in civilian life – ferrying critically injured people, movie crews, and even Donald Trump.  In turn, the market for these expensive flying machines has been a boon for the aviation industry.

#4. What was the relationship between the government/military and the science and technology industry immediately following WWII?

According to Tom Crouch in his book Wings, the breadth of scientific discovery and advancement during World War II shook the foundations of governments (477).  “‘By the time the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’ historian A. Hunter Dupree noted, ‘the entire country was aware that science was a political, economic, and social force of the first magnitude’” (qtd. in Crouch 477).  The United States began taking an interest in the previously ignored research scientists – even going so far as to “marshal the scientific resources of the nation for the war effort, and to coordinate all of the basic research undertaken by the federal government” (Crouch 477).  Suddenly, large universities, which once found it hard to scrape together enough funds to have their scientists live on while they conducted their research, began to receive large chunks of government dollars in the form of grants.  This collaboration spanned the wartime and has never ended.  One early problem during this era was that government funded researchers tended to operate like government agencies – to a prescribed agenda and set of rules which generally excluded “free-thinkers.”  As a result, just after the war, there was a sense that government funded projects were a bit behind private researchers.  U.S. Army Air Corps General Hap Arnold was one of these “free-thinkers” – someone who knew that major technological advances were just around the corner, so to speak.  He enlisted Caltech professor Theodor von Karman to be one of his main advisors and, after the war, sent Karman out all over Europe to investigate every major technology being developed (Crouch 480-81).  The U.S. Navy also had their research traditions, and after the war continued to influence technology.  So, Hap Arnold’s vision of an explosion of technology became reality, in many ways because of Arnold and the U.S. government’s support.

#8. What were some of the aviation technology advances that emerged as a result of the Cold War?

There is nothing like some saber-rattling to get the old war machines revved up, and there was a lot of saber-rattling going on between the United States (with it’s Western allies) and the Soviet Union (with it’s Eastern allies) during the Cold War, which generally spans from 1947 to the early 1990s.  Says Tom Crouch in his book Wings, “The era was marked by a permanent war economy that supported great national scientific and technological projects aimed at the creation of advanced weapons systems” (486). During this time, military expenditures fueled the aviation industry – for instance, by the late 1950s “the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ranked the aviation industry as the largest employer in the manufacturing sector” (Crouch 506).  One major technological advance during the Cold War was the helicopter.  Another was the turbojet, which “not only revolutionized the performance of military aircraft, it gave birth to the era of mass commercial air travel” (Crouch 506).  Advances in aviation electronics also occurred during this time.  This included “black boxes,’ new types of joystick controls, more modern instrument displays, and satellite-based global positioning systems” (Crouch 507). Aircraft became “stealthy” (Crouch 579).  Weapons became “smart” (Crouch 591). Once the Earth’s atmosphere was mastered, military and civilian researchers began reaching for the stars.  It wouldn’t do to have one’s mortal enemies gain the upper hand in the space race. Soon, aviation industry leaders began transitioning to “aerospace” technology.  Investments were made to the “Apollo lunar program,” and all the bells and whistles that went with it (think rockets, satellites, satellite trackers, computers, monitoring equipment, and even new tools with which to fix the new gadgets) (Crouch 508-09).