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 then not too profitably — because some of the agriculture in California can use the benefits of helicopters. For most crop dusting, fixed wing aircraft do just fine — and they’re a lot cheaper. This also presupposes the existence of a large industry in crop fertilizers and pesticides, which is just getting off the ground in the 1632 universe.
2) As soon as he could, my father got out of crop dusting. His next source of income was using his helicopter for news reporters. He was the pilot for the very first use of a helicopter in TV reporting. Of course, this presupposes a developed TV industry, and even then it was something of a stunt.
3) His first big contract was providing transport for army surveyors who wanted to do the first complete survey of Alaska. So we moved to Alaska for a few months. I was four or five years old at the time. If anyone can find an equivalent area in central Europe — huge in area, very rugged terrain, and very sparsely populated — which would need the same arcane transport skills to survey, please let me know where it is. (And don’t bother telling me about trans-Urals Siberia. The Tsars in the mid-1630s are in no position to worry about detailed surveys of Siberia.)
4) The big money, however — this is where he made his millions — came when Shell Oil decided my father’s company could provide their surveyors and engineers a way to get into very difficult to explore regions to look for oil. Places like the inner deserts of North Africa, Borneo and New Guinea.
This is fine and dandy, if you already have a huge and well-developed oil industry that’s already fully developed easy-to-reach areas like, oh, east Texas. And you don’t need a helicopter to set up operations in east Texas. Sailing ships will do fine.
So why would anyone bother to develop helicopters? Without a commercial reason to do so, the only conceivable reason would be military — and even there the only examples anyone can come up with are, being honest, very esoteric. Yes, sorry, they are. Nobody is going to develop a helicopter industry in order to medivac wounded sailors off of sailing ships, very few (if any) of which could land helicopters in the first place.
