April 8th, 2008, 09:42 AM
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Ace
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Join Date: May 2003
Location: The world is my backside, hmm, backyard!
Posts: 6,115
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Re: What if helicopter development was accelerated in World War 2?
There was one at least 
Now seriously, there was some German incipient work with Focke Achgelis (here is Hanna Reitsch fooling around)
And also:
See the the site for the full story.
Quote:
On January 17, 1945, a priority radio stating that a helicopter was urgently needed to rescue a group of American fliers who had been forced down in Burma was sent from Eastern Air Command Headquarters in India to Army Air Forces Headquarters in Washington, D.C. It reached Washington the same day.
On January 26th, only 9 days later, the helicopter had completed the rescue of a wounded enlisted man from the top of an isolated mountain in North Burma. In the interim, the aircraft had been dismantled at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio; loaded, together with trained helicopter personnel, into a C-45 of the Air Transport Command; carried half way around the world to Myitkyina, Burma; reassembled and flown over jungles and 5,000-foot Peaks to accomplish its mission.
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Sikorsky R-4 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In any case it would still take years post war to make a really developed helicopter, so it would be difficult to xcompress all this development work to make a useful and reliable machine to go into quantity service.
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Bah!
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