Helio airplane1/17/2024 ![]() ![]() Thus they conceived the idea of an inexpensive STOL light airplane that was controllable at very low flight speeds. While they were not necessarily pushing for the personal garage concept, they did feel that the ability to land in your own back yard, providing you had a big one, was an achievable goal. The two professors correctly assessed that a major part of the problem was the unfulfilled postwar promise of an airplane in every garage. The two college professors noted the precipitous drop-off of the earlier high demand for light airplanes in the immediate post war years and determined that the market for the standard light planes that required a normal airport had been grossly overestimated. Lynn Bollinger of the prestigious Harvard Business School developed the first Helioplane experimental prototype, a short take off and landing (STOL) light aircraft. In the late 1940s, Otto Koppen of the Aeronautical Engineering faculty at MIT and Dr. It was stored until the mid-1970s when it was loaned to the Experimental Aircraft Association for display at its museum in Hales Corners, Wisconsin. The National Air and Space Museum acquired the Helio-1, with a total flight time of about 100 hours, from the Helio Aircraft Corporation in 1963. However, the market saturation of lightplanes caused the company to redirect its efforts and other aircraft with more utility and payload were developed for both the civilian and military markets. With its first successful flight on April 8, 1949, the Helio-1 demonstrated that a fixed-wing aircraft could be fully controllable at low speeds, making it safe to operate on landing strips roughly the size of a tennis court. Designed to fulfill the post-World War II promise of an airplane in every garage, Otto Koppen and Lynn Bollinger hoped to combine the many advantages of the helicopter with the simplicity, speed, and range of a conventional fixed-wing aircraft. The Helio-1 is generally believed to be the first successful attempt at creating a ultra-short-field airplane. ![]()
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