Harold E. Thompson

Harold E. "Tommy" Thompson (1921 – October 29, 2003) of Hobart, Indiana, was a helicopter aviation pioneer. He was the first man to intentionally loop a helicopter, set three international helicopter speed records, and was the first man to land a helicopter in the courtyard of The Pentagon. Thompson was a veteran of 3,500 hours in single-engine propeller fixed-wing aircraft and 3000 more in helicopters.

Having spent two years at Purdue University, Thompson was called up into the United States Army Air Corps in 1943, a week after he had married his childhood sweetheart, Carolyn Kramer. Thompson served as a P-47 instructor at Moore Field in Mission, Texas until January 1945, when he earned an assignment to the Army's first helicopter class at Chanute Field, Illinois. Later, he was assigned to the Bridgeport, Connecticut, plant of Igor Sikorsky, who pioneered helicopters in America.

After the war, "Tommy" as he was known, got a job as one of Sikorsky's three test pilots—in the trial and error days. The plant produced six helicopters a month, mostly hand built. Engineers tinkered with new designs, and the test pilots tried them out. Most of the early models had slow, sluggish controls - some flew as expected, but others didn't. Thompson was also Igor Sikorsky's personal pilot. By 1949, Thompson was an experienced helicopter pilot. He had been through some forced landings and crashes, but had not been seriously injured.

In 1949, Sikorsky engineers developed the Sikorsky S-52 helicopter. "It was a sharp, responsive dream," Thompson recalls. "After trying some mild acrobatics, I figured it would loop." Until Thompson, no one had dared try to loop a helicopter. As Sikorsky's chief test pilot Jimmy Viner pointed out, "Any of 10 things can go wrong--all fatal,be sure you know what you're doing." Thompson did—erratically at first, then perfectly—10 loops in all, as a movie camera recorded the flight for history.

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