Thousands of feet in the air, the pilot pressed a single button. And the lone rotor blade, fifty feet of metal holding him aloft, stopped dead in midair. Not to land. But to fold flush against the fuselage, turning the helicopter into a jet aircraft screaming forward at 460 mph, nearly twice as fast as anything of its era. On paper, it all made sense. So much sense that Sikorsky won the U.S. Air Force contract in 1950 and held it for nearly a decade. Yet in all those years, not a single piece of metal was ever cut for the XV-2. In this video, we uncover the Sikorsky XV-2, one of the most audacious and impossible helicopter designs in American aviation history. From the 1950 convertiplane competition, through the failures of the Sikorsky S-72 X-Wing (1988) and Boeing X-50A Dragonfly (2004-2006), to the unexpected revival of the one-blade idea in Singapore’s F-SAM drone in 2021. This is th

Source: The Strange One – Bladed Helicopter That Almost Rewrote Aviation Forever