Along the 761-mile airway between Stratford, Conn., and Dayton, Ohio, farmers in the fields last summer saw a strange craft skittering overhead. It had no wings. Its spraddle-legged landing gear hung gauntly from its snub-nosed body. Above the fuselage whirled a shimmering set of paddles, like a busy egg beater. On an open frame at the tail whirled another but smaller airscrew, in a vertical plane: even the tail surfaces of the what-is-it were busy.
But its designer, onetime big-plane builder Igor Sikorsky, knew that fellow airmen no longer regarded the helicopter as a product of aviation's lunatic fringe. This week...
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