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Berlin (dpa) - A full-size replica of Germany's first helicopter, the Focke-Wulf Fw 61, was one of the major attractions as the general public streamed into the ILA air show in Berlin Friday.
A test pilot, Ewald Rohlfs, first took off vertically into the skies over the German city of Bremen on June 26, 1936 aboard the Fw 61, which looked like a regular plane but had rotors each side of the fuselage instead of wings.
That aircraft stayed aloft at a height of 20 metres for 16 minutes and was gradually modified over the next year till it attained an altitude of 2,439 metres. It was then demonstrated at public shows in Berlin by a Nazi woman aviator, Hanna Reitsch.
The ILA replica, which was not airworthy, was exhibited in a hangar at Schoenefeld Airport. The air show continues till Sunday.
ILA organizers described the Fw 61 as the "world's first genuinely functioning helicopter," though historians usually credit Juan de la Cierva's 1923 autogiro or Soviet experiments in the 1920s as the birth of the helicopter.
The designer of the Fw 61 was Henrich Focke (1890-1979), an aircraft engineer who had become a World War One fighter pilot and later founded Focke-Wulf, the Bremen makers of Luftwaffe fighters.
He later set up a new company Focke, Achgelis and Co which built military helicopters but Nazi Germany made only limited use of them during the Second World War.
Focke himself rejected the title "Father of the Helicopter," saying this should go to Leonard da Vinci, who designed one on paper.
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
