Sikorsky Aircraft marked 75 years of modern helicopter flight that began Sept. 14, 1939, when 50-year-old chief designer and chief test pilot Igor Sikorsky lifted off the ground “to tabletop height” in an experimental helicopter designated the VS-300. That first flight began a four-year test program that “proved the efficiency of Sikorsky’s single-rotor design, gave birth to a global helicopter industry and forever changed the course of aviation history,” the company noted. The 1,325-pound-mtow VS-300 had a welded steel-tube frame, three-wheel undercarriage, 75-hp engine and transmission belts and gears that drove the three-blade main rotor and two-blade wooden tail rotor.