Brief History of the UH-1 series Helicopter

  In 1941, the Bell Aircraft Company was a small company trying to build fighters for the Army Air Corps. Their only really successful design was the P-39 Airacobra. In 1941, Larry Bell saw a model helicopter designed by Arthur M. Young. Bell hired Young and the result was the Bell model 47 helicopter, known to the military as the H-13. As Bell moved into the helicopter field, some of the last fixed wing aircraft they would produce were the X-1, which broke the sound barrier, and the X-1A that flew at Mach 2.

  The real design innovation of the Bell 47 (H-13) was the two bladed, “semi rigid” rotor system that has a “stabilizer bar” mounted perpendicular to the blades and below them. This stabilizer bar made the two bladed system controllable, something no other designer had done before. The rotor head wasn't mounted rigid on the mast with each blade flexing separately like other systems, it was mounted on a pivot, like a see saw so both blades moved together. This meant that the plane of the rotor disk could be tilted in relation to the mast, something not found in other systems of the time. 

  The H-13 entered service with the US Army in 1948 and was given the name “Sioux” in the Army tradition of naming Helicopters after Indian tribes. The H-13 became famous as the “medivac” helicopter in the movie and TV shows M.A.S.H. and in the civilian role as the first helicopter certified by the FAA for civilian use.

  After the Korean war ended, the Army started an evaluation of the “lessons learned” and what improvements were needed. As a result, the Army issued a proposal for a “medivac” helicopter to replace the H-13. During Korea, the H-13 had carried the wounded on litters mounted on the skids. They were covered to protect the wounded, but this caused two problems. First, there was no way to carry an attendant to care for the wounded in flight. Secondly, many wounded who were loaded on the litters while they were unconscious, woke up during the flight. Strapped to the litter, and covered, they couldn’t move, and couldn’t see anything, but they could feel the strange movement of the helicopter in flight. The wounded were often terrified by the experience, sometimes thinking they had died and were being taken to hell!

  The Army proposal called for an aircraft large enough to carry litters internally, with an attendant, and be powered by the new “gas turbine” engine. The Army had already been working with Lycoming to develop such an engine. Bells solution was to take a basic box, large enough the hold the litters and attendant, stick a cockpit for two pilots on the front, fuel tanks and the gas turbine engine on the back, and a scaled up rotor and tail boom/tail rotor of the H-13 to make it all work. The result was the XH-40. The Army liked what they saw in the Bell design. The H-13 rotor and tail were proven designs, and Bell had already been working with gas turbine engines. They had an “in house” test model of the Bell 47 (H-13) powered by a French built gas turbine already flying. Six YH-40 preproduction aircraft were ordered.

  The YH-40 became the HU-1A in 1957 when it was accepted for production by the Army, and given the name “Iroquois”. There are several versions of how the HU-1 got the nickname “Huey”, but the most widely accepted is that pilots in the UTTAS unit testing the early HU-1As tried to pronounce the designation and finally settled on “Hui” or Huey. It may have also had something to do with the cartoon character Baby Huey, who somewhat resembled a HU-1 standing on it’s nose.

  In 1962, Robert McNamara changed all aircraft designations to conform to a single system for all the services, and the HU-1 became the UH-1. This helped establish McNamara’s pattern of wanting everything done his way, right or wrong.

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