The Wall Street Journal-20080216-Remembrances
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Remembrances
Full Text (1162 words)FRANK PIASECKI (1919-2008)
Inventor Pioneered Military Helicopters
Often serving as his own test pilot, Frank Piasecki was best known for inventing cargo helicopters featuring tandem rotors for extra lift and stability. Their lineal descendents, Sea Knight and Chinook helicopters, are mainstays for the U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. Piasecki created helicopters for the Army and Navy from the earliest days of the technology until his death on Feb. 11 at age 88 at his home in Philadelphia.
As World War II raged, helicopter pioneer Sikorsky Aircraft's rough- riding choppers were a mainstay for the Army Air Corps, mainly for ferrying spare parts and messages in the Pacific and for tracking enemy submarines. In 1943, a Senate investigation by then Sen. Harry S. Truman was convened to find out why the Navy wasn't looking into this promising technology. Sikorsky was producing at capacity, so the military had to search for someone else who could whip up a batch of the newfangled fliers.
Enter Frank Piasecki. The son of a Polish immigrant tailor, Mr. Piasecki grew up in Philadelphia and worked in high school for manufacturers of autogiros, an early kind of hybrid airplane- helicopter. After engineering studies at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University's Guggenheim School of Aeronautics, he founded P-V Engineering Forum in 1940 with a Penn classmate, Howard Venzie.
Realizing that balanced rotor blades were critical to creating a smoother ride, the firm set out to build a demonstration machine. With a virtually nonexistent operating budget and a staff who mostly had other jobs, Mr. Piasecki jerry-built everything but the rotor and transmission. The first free flight came by accident when a clothesline tether snapped in a high wind with Mr. Piasecki at the controls. The helicopter -- just the second U.S. design ever flown -- was dubbed the PV-2.
Like other helicopter pioneers, Mr. Piasecki conceived of the machine as alternative transportation for commuters. The PV-2 featured a folding rotor assembly for easy storage. A newsreel feature titled "An Air Flivver in Every Garage" showed him backing the helicopter out of the garage, taking off from his driveway, flying to a gas station for a windshield wash and heading to the golf course.
But when he heard of the Navy's search, Mr. Piasecki hooked the PV-2 up to his Studebaker and took back roads to Washington, where he demonstrated it at National Airport. The Navy granted him a development contract. "The Navy expected nothing, but he pulled a rabbit out of a hat," says Roger Conner, curator of vertical flight at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The original PV- 2 hangs from the ceiling at the museum.
The tandem-rotor helicopters he produced emerged too late to see action in the war, but were soon a big hit with the Coast Guard, which painted them yellow. This and the distinctive bent shape are thought to be the genesis of the "flying banana" moniker for the model known as HRP-1.
The HRP-1 was superior to anything Sikorsky produced. It flew faster and higher, rode smoother and could lift more personnel and equipment. And the tandem-rotor system gave it great stability. Sikorsky came up with improvements, and the two firms spent the next several years duking it out for the military-helicopter market.
Military budgets dropped after the war, but investors including Laurence Rockefeller and Felix du Pont Jr. backed the Piasecki Helicopter Corp. By 1953, annual sales had grown to $90 million, mainly on military sales of the H-21 "Workhorse," which could carry up to 20 passengers.
Mr. Piasecki was more engineer than businessman, and in 1955 his board fired him as chairman. His successor, Don R. Berlin, cleaned house. The company merged in 1960 with Boeing Airplane Co., now Boeing Co., which manufacturers the Sea Knight and Chinook helicopters today.
Mr. Piasecki went on to form the Piasecki Aircraft Corp., a research and design firm, where he worked on more exotic projects. They included an airplane with retractable wings that could take off vertically and a platform, dubbed the AirGeep, with ducted fans that could float.
Produced for the Army, a test version of the platform from around 1958 can be seen at the America Helicopter Museum in West Chester, Pa. Design-wise, it had something in common with the flying saucers then invading drive-ins. Later he and his company came up with the Heli- Stat, a blimp with four helicopters underneath meant to lift extra- heavy loads including timber from remote virgin forests. At 343-feet long, it was billed as the largest aircraft in the world. Tragedy struck during a 1986 test flight in Lakehurst N.J. Still close to the ground, the Heli-Stat burst into flames and disintegrated, killing its pilot. Everyone compared it to the explosion of the zeppelin Hindenburg at the same airfield a half-century earlier.
He lived long enough to see the first test flights of his latest vertical creation, the Speed Hawk, a Navy Blackhawk helicopter modified to zoom at over 200 knotts.
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RAY J. WU (1928-2008)
He Created Hardier Rice
To Feed a Growing World
As the earth's population grows toward nine billion by midcentury according to U.N. estimates, scientists are turning to bioengineering to create improved crops.
One of the leaders in the field was Ray J. Wu, a Cornell University professor who died Feb. 10 at age 79. He created a transgenic rice that resists drought, salt water and cold.
A longtime student of genetics, Dr. Wu in the 1970s developed an early technique for determining the nucleotide sequence of DNA. Later, he turned to cancer research and then plant biology.
In the mid-1990s, Dr. Wu and his group field-tested rice that had been modified through the addition of a potato gene to resist pink stem borers. By 2002, he had inserted E. coli genes into rice to make it produce the sugar trehalose when stressed by drought, salt or cold. The sugar occurs naturally in trace quantities in rice. Its ability to resist adverse conditions has long been known in "resurrection plants," hearty desert species that come back to life when it rains.
Having succeeded with rice, Dr. Wu was turning to other crops, including wheat, maize, and tomatoes.
"It's a very powerful technology," says Ajay Garg, a Cornell senior researcher who worked in Dr. Wu's lab. Field tests of the rice are planned in India and Bangladesh in the next few years, says Frank A. Shotkoski, director of a government-funded agricultural biotech project at Cornell.
Born in Beijing, Dr. Wu was the son of Hsien Wu, a biochemistry professor at Peking Union Medical College from the 1920s who did early work on protein folding. According to Dr. Wu's Cornell biography, his father encouraged him to emigrate to the U.S. in 1949. He came to Cornell in 1966 and for years was a leading figure in helping science students from China come to the U.S. for graduate training.
-- Stephen Miller
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