Giving birth to a Sikorsky
80 years ago today. 10 October 1944. Somewhere in India. Helicopter Arrives.
“The fuselage of a helicopter is unloaded from a transport plane by men of the First Air Commando Group in India. The little ship was loaded aboard the big transport in the U.S. only a few days before.”
USAAF photo from the Allison collection, MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History.
While pioneered by the British and the U.S. Coast Guard in late 1943, the Tenth Air Force’s Air Jungle Rescue Detachment, using “the lightest pilots available” started flying early Sikorsky YR-4 helicopters in early 1944, with the first documented CSAR “skyhook” mission occurring n April when 2LT Carter Harman picked up the pilot of a downed L-1 liaison aircraft and three wounded British soldiers– over two days and four flights.
By the end of the war, the 1st ACG, constituted on 25 March 1944, had become perhaps the most experienced “chopper” unit of WWII. They operated four YR-4s “in-country” with two other aircraft destroyed en route.
Today, the USAF SOW commandos look to them as their historical predecessors.