Helicopters: For All Purposes

Los Angeles County deputy sheriffs last week went up in the air to fight crime on the ground. Cruising 20 hours a day in helicopters above the city of Lakewood (pop. 67,000), near Long Beach, the officers kept a particular watch for an ingenious new type of alarm beacon mounted atop homes and stores. The 1,000-watt beacons, visible five miles in daylight and twelve at night, light up either manually or automatically to signal break-ins or holdups. Within 21 minutes at most, the sheriff's men expect to swoop down on the scene, spot suspects with powerful floodlights, direct approaching earth-bound cops or, if necessary, land to give assistance.

Sardines & Church Steeples. The aerial patrol symbolizes the proliferating use of helicopters (see following color pages). The machines remain costly to buy (minimum: $23,750) and tricky to fly, but coptermakers at last have overcome most of the bugs that for 25 years gave their industry more promise than progress. Rotor craft have not only changed the whole nature of the Viet Nam war but now stand on the threshold of a huge market at home.

Construction men now use the whirlybirds to lift church steeples and TV towers, telephone poles and prefab homes. The machines have become the most up-to-date tool for crop dusting, spraying, seeding, fertilizing; on giant ranches, one copter can do the work of 18 cowboys herding cattle. One New Orleans copter taxi operator ferries 180,000 oil workers a year to offshore rigs. The U.S. Forest Service blows out woodland fires with the downdraft from whirling rotors. New York Mayor John Lindsay is having a $3,000 helipad built in the East River beside his official home, Gracie Mansion, so he can whisk above the perpetual traffic snarls to fires, crashes—and his city hall office.

Though the number of helicopters in commercial use has climbed from 936 in 1960 to 2,390 today, the main lift in the industry's fortunes has come from Viet Nam. The Defense Department last year took 80% of the $875 million output of the seven major producers: Textron's Bell Helicopter, Boeing-Vertol, United Aircraft's Sikorsky Division, Kaman, Hughes Tool, Fairchild-Hiller and Brantly, which was acquired last week by Lear Jet Corp. This year the Pentagon will spend $1.3 billion for 3,156 choppers, absorb 90% of U.S. production.

Out of the Paddies. Considering the exploits of the 1,800 copters already in Viet Nam, it is no wonder. Such choppers as Bell's ubiquitous UH-1B Huey and Vertol's 44-passenger Chinook are able not only to harry the elusive enemy with rocket and strafing attacks but to carry foot soldiers into battle at 150 m.p.h., eliminating bone-wearying marches through flooded paddies and jungles. Four $2,000,000 Sikorsky CH54A Skycranes, which look gawky but can haul 87 men or a field hospital under their bellies, have so far retrieved 100 downed aircraft—$37 million worth—to fly and fight again.

Thanks to swift helicopter evacuation, less than 1% of the U.S.'s wounded in Viet Nam die, as against 10% in the infancy of copter medical aid in Korea. Though copters do get shot down, they have shown surprisingly low vulnerability. Having lost only one per 16,824 sorties, the Army figures that their Viet Nam life expectancy is ten years, considerably more than that of civilian autos at home.