It was close to some of the toughest fighting late in the Korean War, including battles at Heartbreak Ridge and Bloody Ridge.

It’s the winter of 1952, and this H-13 is parked in the Haean Basin, an oval-shaped valley just south of today’s DMZ between North and South Korea-dubbed the “Punchbowl” by American troops. Army, which designated it as the H-13 Sioux. However, improvements to Young’s Model 30 by late 1945 gave rise to the Model 47, a product Bell Aircraft viewed as marketable. Army, which saw limited search-and-rescue operations in the Burma Theater. In 1943 Igor Sikorsky sold the R-4 helicopter to the U.S. The Germans created a number of prototypes during the war. It was not the first helicopter to be developed. Over the next few years, the small engineering team led by Young developed a helicopter, the Model 30, capable of controlled flight. In 1941, he took his models to Bell Aircraft in Buffalo, New York, and the company agreed to work with him in developing full-size prototypes.

READ MORE: Canada’s Rugged, All-Metal National AirplaneĪt his family’s farm outside of Philadelphia, Young spent 12 years conducting private experiments with model helicopters until he could reliably get them to fly.

At that time, the development of helicopters was a field full of eccentrics, and Young fit the profile of the lone oddball genius.

Drawn to philosophy, Young wanted to tie his more esoteric interests to the solution of elusive practical problems, and the one that intrigued him most was the helicopter. Bell was known for producing highly innovative if not necessarily successful airplanes during World War II, most notably the tricycle-gear P-39 Airacobra fighter.īut the story of the first Bell helicopter begins in 1927, when a man named Arthur Young graduated from Princeton University with a degree in mathematics. The Bell 47 was produced by Bell Aircraft, founded by Larry Bell in 1935. Today in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, I’m in Korea to fly the Bell 47, the iconic chopper from the TV show M*A*S*H and the first helicopter to be certified for civilian use.

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