Harold E. Thompson
Harold E. Thompson (1921-2003-Hobart, Indiana) was an air pioneer when it came to helicopter history. He was the first man to intentionally loop a helicopter, the first man to fly one 129.5 Mph and the first man to land a whirlybird in the Pentagon courtyard.
Life & Work
Thompson was a veteran of 3,500 hours in Air Force single-engine propeller planes and 3000 more in helicopters. Having spent 2 years at Purdue University, he enlisted in the Air Force in 1942, married his childhood sweetheart, Carolyn Kramer, and won his wings the next year. He served as a P-47 instructor until January, 1945, when he wangled an assignment to the Air Force's first helicopter class at Chanute Field, Illinios, and later to the Bridgeport, Connecticut, plant of Igor Sikorsky, who pioneered helicopters in America.
After the war, "Tommy" as he was known, got a job as one of Sikorsky's three test pilots--in the trial and error days. The plant produced six helicopters a month, mostly hand built. Engineers tinkered with new designs, and the test pilots tried them out. Most of the early models had slow, sluggish controls. Some flew as expected. Some Didn’t.
By 1949, Tommy was an old hand. He'd been through some forced landings and crashes, but he’d been lucky. That year Sikorsky engineers came up with the S-52. "It was a sharp, responsive dream," Tommy recalls. After trying some mild acrobatics, I figured it would loop."
Up to then, no one had dared try to loop a helicopter. Sikorsky's chief test pilot Jimmy Viner pointed out: "Any of 10 things can go wrong--all fatal. be sure you know what you're doing." Tommy did--erratically at first, then perfectly--10 loops in all, as a movie camera recorded the flight for history.
In the S-52 that year he went to the Cleveland air races, where he set the first of three international speed records that he was to achieve in the choppers.
When he wasn't testing them, breaking records in them, or delivering them, Tommy was teaching others how to fly helicopters. His students included Admiral Arthur Radford; Pat Handy, first woman to fly one solo; Rodman Wanamaker, Eastern department store tycoon, and several foreign trainees.
Tommy's career came to an abrupt halt on a spring day in 1950, when test pilot Thompson took an admiral aloft at the Navy's Lakehurst, New Jersey, base. Suddenly, a shaft snapped, and the tail rotor came apart. Skillfully the 29-year old pilot kept the craft from spinning around, the usual result of such a calamity. They landed hard, crushed the landing gear and tilted,, while the spinning overhead rotor chewed up the ground and disintegrated. Tommy crawled out with nothing worse than a cut cheek. The admiral was shaken, but game: "All in a day's work, eh, boy?" Tommy however had walked away from more than 20 forced landings and now his fifth helicopter crash, figured he'd stretched the law of averages too far. "Maybe for you, sir, but not for me," he answered.
That night he talked to his wife and never set foot in another helicopter until 1979.
Tommy died in October of 2003 in Hobart, Indiana.