This was a very active thread with several dozen comments. I am not attempting to summarize it all by any stretch because Eric can’t be any clearer, or more succinct, in the actual answer. – Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine) Baen’s Bar Question: When will we see the first practical USE helicopter? 10 May 2010 16:42:12 GMT As it happens, my father pioneered the use of helicopters for commercial purposes after World War II. He’d been one of the first helicopter pilots for the U.S. Army Air Corps during the war. He was featured in articles written at the time in Readers Digest and the Wall Street Journal, and even today you can find any number of references to him online. Here are a couple of the links:http://new.rotor.com/AboutHAI.aspx http://www.verticalmag.com/control/news/templates/?a241 In addition, my wife worked for ten years assembling transmissions for army attack helicopters, which is highly skilled labor because the equipment is so incredibly complex and finicky. Despite making his money with helicopters — he became a multi-millionaire before he lost it all in foolish other investments — my father never liked the damn things. He was an expert pilot of all manner of aircraft, and he was very fond of the saying: “A plane just naturally wants to fly. A helicopter just naturally wants to crash.” The point of all this is that there is no way in God’s green earth that helicopters are going to appear any time soon in the 1632 universe. Not only are they far more difficult to build and maintain than fixed wing aircraft, they don’t have that many commercial uses. No, they don’t. You really need a HIGHLY developed industrial society before there are enough niches for helicopters to be commercially profitable. You want to know how my father made his money? And he was THE pioneer in commercial helicopters.As follows: 1) Crop dusting, initially. This only worked — and…