Igor Sikorsky United States in 1919, Sikorsky founded the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation in 1923, and developed the first of Pan American Airways' ocean-conquering flying boats in the 1930s. In 1939, Sikorsky designed and flew the Vought-Sikorsky VS-300, the first viable American helicopter, which pioneered the rotor configuration used by most helicopters today. Sikorsky modified the design into the Sikorsky R-4, which became the world's first mass-produced helicopter in 1942. Igor Sikorsky was born in Kiev, Russian Empire (in present-day Ukraine), the youngest of five children. His father, Ivan Alexeevich Sikorsky, was a professor of psychology of Kiev St. Vladimir University, a psychiatrist
Igor Sikorsky Kiev Polytechnic Institute. After the academic year, Sikorsky again accompanied his father to Germany in the summer of 1908, where he learned of the accomplishments of the Wright brothers' Flyer and Ferdinand von Zeppelin's dirigible. Sikorsky later said about this event: "Within twenty-four hours, I decided to change my life's work. I would study aviation." By the start of World War I in 1914, Sikorsky's airplane research and production business in Kiev was flourishing, and his factory made bombers during the war. After the Bolshevik revolution began in 1917, Igor Sikorsky fled his homeland, because the new government threatened to