the.com/helicopter
a machine that beats the air into submission until it agrees to lift you.
means An aircraft that achieves lift and flight using horizontally spinning rotor blades, allowing it to take off vertically, hover, and move in any direction.
from Coined in the 19th century from French hélicoptère, which welds together Greek helix, helikos 'spiral, screw' and pteron 'wing' — literally 'spiral wing.' Note the natural break is helico-pter, not heli-copter, though the language has long since cheerfully ignored that and chopped it into 'chopper' and 'heli' anyway. The word predates any working machine by decades, a name waiting patiently for the thing it described.
- engine fails
- can still land via autorotation, no power needed
- name origin
- Greek for spiral wing, not heli-copter
- blade tips
- can approach the speed of sound
- first flight
- Da Vinci sketched one around 1480
- hovering cost
- burns more fuel hovering than flying forward
sikorsky r-4 — first mass-produced helicopter, used by us army in 1942
bell uh-1 huey — iconic vietnam war transport helicopter, over 7,000 built
apache ah-64 — attack helicopter used by us military since 1986