Past, Present and Future of Military Helicopters

Abstract

Parallel with the development of fixed-wing aircraft the designers were also inspired by the possibilities of rotary  wing flying. Although four years after the Wright brothers  rose into the air, the first helicopter also took off in 1907, but it still took a long time until the first practically usable helicopters were born. The main reason was that the  asymmetric flow of the rotor system, the complexity of the helicopter control system, and the difficulty of the anti-torque system have long been an unsolvable task for  designers. However, in the 1930s, with design and flight  experience gained with autogyros, they came closer and  closer to solving the practical problems of helicopter flight.  In the 1940s the era of rotary wing flying has begun, which  was rapidly followed by their large number of appearances  and widespread use in both civil and military aviation. In this paper I would like to present, due to the size of the  topic, only some important fractions of this process.