Helicopter

A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft that uses horizontally spinning rotors to generate lift and propulsion, allowing it to take off and land vertically, hover in place and fly in any direction unlike a fixed-wing aircraft. The German engineer Heinrich Focke designed the transverse twin-rotor Focke-Wulf Fw 61, the first successful and practical helicopter, which first flew in June 1936 and was publicly demonstrated by the pilot Hanna Reitsch inside Berlin's Deutschlandhalle in February 1938. Igor Sikorsky then developed the now-dominant single-main-rotor-with-tail-rotor configuration through four iterations of his VS-300 between 1939 and 1943, a design lineage that led to the Sikorsky R-4 becoming, in 1942, the first helicopter to reach full-scale production.