Turbomeca First to Power Turbine Helo 50 Years Ago

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or, as it often seems, it has all been done before.

But there has to be a very first time. For Turbomeca that was fifty years ago, when it provided the primary power for the world's first flight of a gas turbine helicopter -- the French "Ariel III."

On April 18, 1951, Ariel III took to the skies amid the whine of the Turbomeca Artouste turbine and the roar of high-pressure air, with flames streaking from its rotor tips. The feat proved a gas turbine helicopter could fly, but the Ariel III also demonstrated hideous noise and a prodigious thirst as kerosene burned furiously in rotor-tip jet nozzles force-fed with air from a huge engine-driven air compressor.

While the compressed-air jet-tips proved a technological dead-end (except for the light Djinn helicopter which built on the Ariel's mechanical features), the gas turbine had established itself in helicopters. But ever since, it has driven the main rotors directly through shafts and gearboxes.

The Ariel III was ahead of its time in many ways. Not least was its "No Tail Rotor" form of directional control-the exhaust of the Artouste gas turbine was ducted through the tail boom to a controllable vent facing sideways at its tip.

Nobody now remembers the company that built the Ariel III, SNCASO. But the manufacturer subsequently became a forming partner of Sud-Aviation, which later became Aerospatiale, and eventually today's Eurocopter after linking with Germany's Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm.