How 18-year-old Stanley Hiller put America's first coaxial rotorcraft together in a Bay Area garage
By age 12, Stanley Hiller Jr. was running a successful Berkeley business manufacturing gas-powered model racing cars. By 15, he employed up to 300 people. By 17, he had designed a working model of a coaxial-rotor helicopter and pitched it to the U.S. Army in Washington — earning both their approval and a draft deferment so he could build the full-scale version. He founded Hiller Industries in 1942 in a small Oakland automotive garage, taught himself to fly while testing the prototype, and on July 4, 1944, lifted off in the bright yellow XH-44 "Hiller-Copter" inside UC Berkeley's Memorial Stadium. He was 19 years old. The XH-44 was the first successful coaxial-rotor helicopter to fly in the United States, the first to use all-metal rotor blades, and the first helicopter built on the West Coast. Hiller went on to design dozens of experimental rotorcraft — the YH-32 ramjet-powered Hornet, the X-18 tilt-wing, the Rotorcycle, and the Hiller 12 light helicopter that became a workhorse for armies and ranchers. His company collaborated with Henry J. Kaiser, became United Helicopters in 1945, and in 1949 a Hiller 360 became the first civilian helicopter to cross America. Stanley Hiller died in 2006 at 81. The Hiller Aviation Museum, which he founded in 1998 at KSQL San Carlos, is his living legacy — and houses the deepest vertical-flight collection on Earth. The XH-44 itself is at the Smithsonian.