Vertical Challenge

In the Hiller Aircraft Company, Frank Coffyn witnessed a similar development process. Stanley Hiller, Jr. – who built and flew his own helicopter by 1944 – and his small team set their sights on the commercial helicopter business with scarcely more real support than the Wrights had enjoyed in their quest. Woefully little information on helicopters existed in print, particularly "hard" engineering data. Worse still, Sikorsky and the few other centers of helicopter development were all back East, too far from the California-based company to be of much help. Finally, the two camps one might have expected to champion this new form of flight – autogyro manufacturers like Pitcairn and Kellett, and major fixed-wing aircraft companies like Douglas of Lockheed – provided minimal leadership; the helicopter, it appeared at the close of World War II, was still the largely unwanted stepchild of aviation.

Not to Stanley Hiller, Hoping to exploit a widely heralded postwar market for a personal helicopters – a market that never materialized – he began work in 1942 against seemingly overwhelming odds and attained volume production of a successful commercial helicopter before the decade was out. The Hiller 360 – history’s first stable production helicopter – differs from those of other successful manufacturers in that it arose entirely as a private venture, belying the oft-repeated view that all development in this field was the result of military spending.

The Bell Model 47 – the industry’s first production civil helicopter – enjoyed government support, albeit indirectly. Developed by mathematician Arthur Young and his small team in the early and mid-1940s, this excellent helicopter was financed with profits from World War II sales of P-39s and other Bell military aircraft. The company’s postwar contracts in support of U.S. Air Force/National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) high-speed flight research added a boost of a promotional nature: when Captain Charles E. Yeager shattered the sound barrier in his Bell X-1 rocket plane on 14 October 1947, the Bell 47 inevitably rode the X-1’s coattails.

Despite an estimated 300 helicopter projects in the United States during and just after World War II (the vast majority never giving rise to flying prototypes), only four companies – Sikorsky, Bell, Piasecki, and Hiller – actually achieved volume production before the end of the 1940s. Hiller Aircraft, which built the first successful helicopter west of the Mississippi River, was the third company to receive an approved type certificate for helicopter production in the United States.

But manufacturing helicopters in only one part of Hiller Aircraft’s astonishing twenty-five-year history of creativity. Flying platforms, flying jeeps, and flying submarines; ramjet helicopters and mammoth aerial cranes with jet engines at their rotor tips; tilt-wing transport planes capable of taking off and landing vertically; wingless battlefield-resupply aircraft designed to hug the ground at Mach 1 and land in their own length – the list of flying machines proposed or actually built by Hiller Aircraft often reads more like science fiction than fact.

Amazingly, the craft mentioned above could all have flown, and many did, with technology available in the 1950s and early 1960s. First in the vertical flight industry with a separate engineering think tank akin to Lockheed’s famous Skunk Works, Hiller Aircraft made research and development, along with helicopter production, its life’s blood to compensate for its newness, small size, and lack of war-won capital.

Of the military services, the U.S. Army was the logical customer for Hiller Aircraft. Hiller’s creativity found little support within that service, however, because those with an understanding of aviation and aerial requirements had left when the Army Air Forces became the separate U.S. Air Force in 1947. Much of what might have been, therefore, never progressed beyond the proposal or prototype stage.

Hiller produced military and commercial helicopters for fifteen years in healthy competition with Bell Helicopters. Then in the mid-1960s, a new competitor disrupted the light helicopter industry by subverting the legitimate procurement process thereby stealing, in effect, the contract for the Army’s milestone light observation helicopter (LOH). With this theft, Hughes Tool company’s Aircraft Division drove Hiller’s Palo Alto company out of business. In an ironic twist of fate, Stanley Hiller would himself in later years engineer a successful takeover to save a then-ailing Hughes Tool Company.

Hiller Aircraft has left a legacy disproportionate to its small size. In addition to a line of excellent production helicopters, its talented team of engineers generated imaginative flight concepts. Huge flying cranes with jet engines at the tips of their rotor blades, ducted-fan flying machines, vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) intercity airliners, and other as-yet-unrealized aviation possibilities bear this company’s distinctive stamp to varying degrees. These efforts to change the face of aviation across a quarter-century make Hiller Aircraft a fascinating case study within the vertical flight industry.