In writing this essay on rotorcraft I have chosen to confine my interests to the flying machines themselves, their development and the pressures that are shaping their future. The tew paragraphs that record the early days of rotary wing flight are a small precis of far more detailed published works that plot the history and personalities involved in bringing helicopters to the market place. In the Centenary Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, published in 1966, Raoul Hafner contributed a chapter on British Rotorcraft~((1)). Hafner's paper bears the hallmark of being a personal memoir from one who was actually there, finding the fundamental solutions to helicopter engineering problems and seeing them continue to be used as part of the basic fabric of our technology today. Others have gathered the historical evidence and offer it to us in an orderly manner to mark the path that our technical field has followed. Such an example is the paper by Professor Gordon Leish-man published by the A1AA in 2001 ~((2)). For the most part the choice of those major issues that influenced the helicopter in its steps to maturity reflect my own views of what forced the product to move forward. Certainly the speculation of how helicopters may develop, what configurations may challenge them (or enhance them) and their changing market place, are totally personal observations. Finally I make no excuse for my preoccupation with the rotor technologies and their influence on the rotorcraft's ability to do a worthwhile job. It seems to me that the rotor is the key to both the success and potential failure of our product and is intimately linked with the choices we may make on how rotorcraft will be configured in the future.
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