Helicopter Theory

by Wayne Johnson

The history of the helicopter may be traced back to the Chinese flying top (c. 400 B.C.) and to the work of Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched designs for a vertical flight machine utilizing a screw-type propeller. In the late nineteenth century, Thomas Edison experimented with helicopter models, realizing that no such machine would be able to fly until the development of a sufficiently lightweight engine. When the internal combustion gasoline engine came on the scene around 1900, the stage was set for the real development of helicopter technology.
While this text provides a concise history of helicopter development, its true purpose is to provide the engineering analysis required to design a highly successful rotorcraft. Toward that end the book offers thorough, comprehensive coverage of the theory of helicopter the elements of vertical flight, forward flight, performance, design, mathematics of rotating systems, rotary wing dynamics and aerodynamics, aeroelasticity, stability and control, stall, noise and more.
Wayne Johnson has worked for the U.S. Army and NASA at the Ames Research Center in California. Through his company Johnson Aeronautics, he is engaged in the development of software that is used throughout the world for the analysis of rotorcraft. In this book, Dr. Johnson has compiled a monumental resource that is essential reading for any student or aeronautical engineer interested in the design and development of vertical-flight aircraft.

Genres: Engineering

1120 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1980

About the author

Wayne Johnson is the author of five critically-acclaimed novels: The Snake Game (Knopf), Don’t Think Twice (Crown/Harmony), Six Crooked Highways (Crown/Harmony), and The Devil You Know (Shaye Areheart Books). Under the pseudonym Albertine Strong, Johnson published Deluge (Crown/Harmony).

​Among Johnson’s public accolades have been a listing as a London Times bestseller for The Snake Game; three Pulitzer nominations (for Deluge, Don’t Think Twice, and The Devil You Know); New York Times Notable Book citations (for Deluge and Don’t Think Twice); inclusion in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Series (for Deluge); recognition as a Minnesota Book Award Finalist (for Six Crooked Highways); recognition as a Great Lakes Book Association Finalist (for Deluge); and a Kansas City Star Book of the Year citation (for Six Crooked Highways).

Johnson has garnered excellent reviews (in addition to those from NYT) from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, ALA, Booklist, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, and other journals. He has been a Chesterfield Writers’ Film Project Fellow in Hollywood and has received recognition from the Sundance Film Festival for his screenplays.

His first non-fiction title, White Heat: the Extreme Skiing Life, was published by Atria in December 2007 and sold 10,000 copies in the first month. The paperback edition of White Heat was released in 2008, and the book has recently come out with Simon & Schuster UK and Pocket Books. Live to Ride, a non-fiction work on motorcycles, was published in hardback by Simon & Schuster, June 2010, and in paperback 2011 to broad critical acclaim.

In 2013, Wayne's memoir, Baseball Diaries: Confessions of a Cold War Youth, was published by Submarine Publishing in paperback and as a Kindle title, where it enjoys a 5-star rating on Amazon.com.

Of mixed Native and European descent, Johnson grew up on the south side of Minneapolis, and in the north lakes region of Minnesota on the White Earth and Red Lake Reservations. Johnson studied microbiology at the University of Minnesota before discovering the pleasures of hang gliding near Bozeman, Montana, where he finished his undergraduate degrees in English and Philosophy. A Teaching-Writing Fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Johnson lives and skis in Utah, where he does emergency outdoor medical rescue for the Park City Ski Patrol. He is a long-time faculty member of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in Iowa City.

Reviews

[Jon M · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great romance novel akin to beauty and the beast. The protagonist Physics and her sister fluid dynamics meet a strange animal called the rotorcraft. It's a story of trial and error, destruction, and subsequently finding the balance to make a good couple.

But seriously, you'll be reading this book a lot if you're studying the principles of designing a helicopter.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was published in 1994 and draws on earlier research proceedings, so in places it may be out of date. Also, this book is long, dense, and very dry, but if you're in aerospace engineering or otherwise keenly interested in how helicopters fly, this is your bible.