On This Day
1936 – Initial flight of the Focke-Wulf Fw 61, the first practical helicopter.
The Focke-Wulf Fw 61 is often considered the first practical, functional helicopter, first flown in 1936.[1] It was also known as the Fa 61, as Focke began a new company—Focke-Achgelis—after development had begun.
Design and development
Professor Henrich Focke, through his development of the Fw 186, and through his work on the C.19 and licence-built C.30 autogyros,[2] came to the conclusion that the limitations of autogyros could be eliminated only by an aircraft capable of vertical flight, the helicopter. He and engineer Gerd Achgelis started the design for this helicopter in 1932. A free-flying model, built in 1934 and propelled by a small two-stroke engine, brought the promise of success. Today, the model can be seen in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
On 9 February 1935, Focke received an order for the building of a prototype, which was designated the Fw 61; Focke referred to it as the F 61. Roluf Lucht of the technical office of the RLM extended the order for a second aircraft on 19 December 1935. The airframe was based on that of a well-tried training aircraft, the Focke-Wulf Fw 44 Stieglitz.
Using rotor technology licensed from the Cierva Autogiro Company, a single radial engine drove twin rotors, set on tubular steel outriggers to the left and right of the fuselage.[2] Each main rotor consisted of three articulated and tapered blades, driven by the engine through gears and shafts. Longitudinal and directional control was achieved using cyclic pitch and asymmetric rotor lift.[3] The counter-rotation of the two rotors solved the problem of torque-reaction as also shown by Louis Bréguet. The small horizontal-axis propeller directly driven by the engine was purely to provide the necessary airflow to cool the engine during low speed or hovering flight and provided negligible forward thrust.[4][2]
Only two aircraft were produced.[1] The first prototype, the V 1 D-EBVU, had its first free flight on 26 June 1936 with Ewald Rohlfs at the controls.[4] By early 1937, the second prototype, V 2 D-EKRA, was completed and flown for its first flight. On 10 May 1937, it accomplished its first autorotation landing with the engine turned off.
Focke-Achgelis began work on a two-seat sports version of the Fw 61, the Fa 224, which would have used an Argus As 10C engine and had greater performance. However, the Fa 224 never left the drawing board at the outbreak of WW2.[5]
Operational history
In February 1938, the Fw 61 was demonstrated by Hanna Reitsch indoors at the Deutschlandhalle sports stadium in Berlin, Germany.[6] It subsequently set several records for altitude, speed and flight duration culminating, in June 1938, with an altitude record of 3,427 m (11,243 ft),[2] breaking the unofficial 605 meter altitude record of the TsAGI 1-EA single lift-rotor helicopter from the Soviet Union set in August 1932, and a straight line flight record of 230 km (143 mi).
Neither of these machines appear to have survived World War II, although a replica is on display at the Hubschraubermuseum in Bückeburg, Germany.
Born On This Day
1893 – Dorothy Fuldheim, American journalist and author (d. 1989)
Dorothy Fuldheim (June 26, 1893 – November 3, 1989) was an American journalist and anchor, spending the majority of her career for The Cleveland Press and WEWS-TV, both based in Cleveland, Ohio.
Fuldheim has a role in United States television news history; she is credited with being the first woman in the United States to anchor a television news broadcast as well to host her own television show. She has been referred to as the “First Lady of Television News.” [1]
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FYI
WAIT
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
I am grateful to Rosanne Cash and the New York Public Library’s Paul Holdengräber for bringing this enormously enlivening poem to my attention. Complement it with Diane Ackerman on what working at a suicide prevention hotline taught her about the human spirit.
The Passive Voice: Spotify: We ‘Overpaid’ Songwriters and Their Publishers in 2018, and We Would like Our Money Back; The Time I Called out a Children’s Book Author for Letting Girls Down and more ->
GlacierHub—Newsletter—June 24, 2019
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wikimedia
- Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for October 4 October 4, 2024Picture of the day Crucifix and shadow on the wall, Abbey of Saint Peter (Assisi). Today is the feast of Francis of Assisi, Patron Saint of Ecologists.
- Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for October 3 October 3, 2024Picture of the day Philippsruhe castle in Hanau-Kesselstadt, seen from the west from the park.