I’ve heard Ridgefield had a pioneer in the field of helicopters. Who is that?
Long before the military developed vertical take-off and landing aircraft, like the Osprey, Gerard P. Herrick of High Ridge had invented a vertaplane.
Born in 1873, Herrick was a lawyer who tinkered with engineering. After serving in World War I in the Army Air Service, the Princeton graduate proposed a convertible aircraft that could fly both fixed-wing and as a “giroplane” or helicopter.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he partnered with a couple of aircraft manufacturers to build a working model.
“The first aircraft, the HV-1, was ready on Nov. 6, 1931,” the Smithsonian Institution says. “The test pilot, Merrill Lambert, made several successful test flights in both fixed- and rotating-wing mode, but when he attempted an in-flight transition between the two, the aircraft fell out of control and crashed. Lambert bailed out of the aircraft, but was killed when his parachute failed to open.”
Ridgefield historian Richard E. Venus described how the aircraft worked. The “plane would take off vertically, by use of a propeller on its top. [The] gyroplane had wings that folded back like the wings of a bird. When the plane reached the desired height, the wings snapped forward into place and the plane then flew off horizontally.”
A new version, the HV-2a, began flying successfully in 1936, cruising at 100 mph as a fixed-wing plane and 65 mph in autogyro mode. It needed only 60 feet of runway to take off.
Unfortunately, the aircraft’s “remarkable performance did not justify production as the weight penalties imposed by carrying both rotary and fixed wing structures eliminated its commercial advantage over conventional airplanes,” the Smithsonian said.
Herrick continued to work on convertible airplane ideas and unsuccessfully tried to gain investor and government support until his death in 1955.
He and his wife, Lois, had a home on High Ridge from the 1920s. A large garage in back once housed the HV-2a, Mr. Venus recalled.
After Mrs. Herrick died in the 1970s, Mr. Venus was at an estate sale on the property when he came across “the largest propeller that I had ever seen, lying on the floor of the garage. No doubt this enormous thing could lift a house right off the ground if you had a machine with the energy to turn it.”
He concluded it was a spare propeller for the HV-2a, which had already been given to the Smithsonian.
Incidentally, Mr. Herrick was a cousin of Myron T. Herrick, the U.S. ambassador to France who greeted Charles Lindbergh on his arrival in Paris in 1927. He must have been popular: He’s the only American ambassador to France with a street in Paris — Avenue Myron Herrick — named after him. —J.S.
