Wilford Gyroplane
1930s American autogyro
The Wilford Gyroplane was based on a German autogyro first flown in 1926. After E. Burke Wilford bought the rights and patents, it was developed in the US until 1936.
Design and development
1926-1930
The idea for an auto-rotating and auto-feathering rotor for what became known as autogyros was developed and patented in the mid-1920s in Germany by Walter Rieseler and Walter Kreisler. They built a wingless example in 1926. In the autumn of 1928 E. Burke Wilford bought the patent rights and in March 1930 a similar wingless autogyro with a conventional tail was built in the US at the Uppercu works in Keyport, New Jersey with Rieseler and Kreisler supervising. Powered by an 85 hp (63 kW) Cirrus upright engine, this ambitious design failed because of its choice of a Göttingen 429 airfoil section for the four rotor blades. The next iteration added stub wings and new rotor blades of USA 35B section to the earlier fuselage and engine. It also had a revised undercarriage. Built at Paoli by the Pennsylvania Syndicate, this became known as the Wilford Gyroplane.
Its rotor had a diameter of 25 ft (7.6 m), though the broad blades began about 1 ft 3 in (0.38 m) from their common vertical mast.
The public source identifies “Wilford Gyroplane” as 1930s American autogyro. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Wilford, Gyroplane and 1930s.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wilford Gyroplane” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.