Igor Sikorsky; His Three Careers in Aviation

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1969. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good. xi, [3], 272, [2] pages. Frontis illustration. Foreword by Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle. Illustrations. Index. Some page rippling at front noted. Tape marks noted. Frank J. Delear was at one time the public relations manager at Sikorsky Aircraft. Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky (May 25, 1889 - October 26, 1972), was a Russian- American aviation pioneer in both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. His first success came with the S-2, the second aircraft of his design and construction. His fifth airplane, the S-5, won him national recognition. His S-6-A received the highest award at the 1912 Moscow Aviation Exhibition, and that year the aircraft won for its young designer, builder and pilot first prize in the military competition at Saint Petersburg. Sikorsky founded the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation in 1923, and developed the first of Pan American Airways' ocean-conquering flying boats in the 1930s. In 1939, Sikorsky designed and flew the Vought-Sikorsky VS-300, the first viable American helicopter. Derived from a Kirkus review: A magnificent man and his flying machines: the plural engine plane, the amphibian type, and the helicopter. This is part sentimental tribute and part exacting biography. As a boy in Russia Igor was determined, before the age of thirty he was a grand success, but the Bolshevik Revolution sent him off to the U.S.A., and he lived in New York poor but hopeful until he found men who would back his ideas. According to Mr. Delear, Sikorsky was unfailingly optimistic and of consummately noble character, an intuitive aeronautical genius and a godly human being; Igor is somewhat smothered by this kind of testimonial, yet quotes and anecdotes abound to correlate the man with the myth. As for the aviational material: it and its heroes are here in detail (Lindbergh, Bleriot, etc.), but this is foremost an adulatory biography, and only supplementally a source of technical data.