The word helicopter might sound like technical jargon today if the tumultuous 20th century had not shaken Spain with its three-year war of fraternity. Instead we would talk about “Spanish dragonflies”. Nor does the name of Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky, one of the “fathers” of modern rotorcraft, tell us much. When asked about the key names of the invention, we would answer with the more traditional surnames: Cantero Villamil. Federico Cantero Villamil.

This is perhaps, and only perhaps, if the war and its scars of misery had not come between us.

Ucronias and other counterfactual stories aside, the truth is that Spain had the potential to become the cradle of modern helicopters and get ahead of Sikorsky. Juan de la Cierva provided the key technology and Cantero Villamil stepped in a prototype in the early 1930s.

Due to the blow of the war, he lost his ticket, or at least his chance in the race; but that doesn’t mean it didn’t fight and isn’t in its own chapter in aviation history. We first started from De la Cierva years ago to justify his legacy; The second is not yet known. So much so that he does not even have a street of his own in his hometown of Madrid.

Who was Cantero Villamil?

So what was the “Spanish Dragonfly”?

dream of flying

Patent No. 149788.

Every generation has its obsessions. Today we dream of stepping on Mars and exploring the South Pole of the Moon. They did so by flying at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, an idea that sprouted in some of Spain’s brightest minds at the turn of the century. It happened to Leonardo Torres Quevedo. To Emilio Herrera Linares. To Juan de la Cierva. And perhaps the least known is Federico Cantero Villamil (1874-1946). Each has its own characteristics and approaches.

In Cantero’s case, the dream of flying in the sky was caught very early on during his high school years. While his steps didn’t exactly lead him to aviation—on paper he was a civil engineer—and he had to invest most of his time in it. hydropower projects and railroaders, flying was an obsession that accompanied him for the rest of his life.

The Madrid engineer delved into the challenges of flight, read the works of Gustave Eiffel, and even wrote to another French pilot, Louis Blériot, to help him design his own airplane. However, his interest began to focus on a peculiar way of flying through the sky, unlike the ship the Wright brothers used for their 1903 flight over the United States: the helicopter. The advantages it certainly has: vertical take-off and landing promised safer and maneuvering in smaller spaces.

In 1910, Cantero recorded his first ideas for the device. He was not the first and certainly not the only one to work along similar lines. Apart from da Vinci’s 15th-century sketches, other minds were wondering how to improve the device. By 1907 Paul Cornu already had a distinctive twin-rotor prototype, and soon after Raúl Pateras de Pescara produced more or less functional devices; Experimented with Juan de la Cierva in Spain gyroplane and – most importantly – its rotors, so important that pioneers like Sikorsky recognized their role.

Viblandi II Dragonfly Prototype (1941).

In this race, Cantero Villamil went to great lengths to resolve the support issue. He didn’t have enough resources, so he had to run his own tests that he built. a home aerodynamics lab, a full-fledged test bench for rotors that he installed with more enthusiasm than resources in the garden of his own home in Zamora. There he completed the tests, which he later documented in detail, following the method suggested by Eiffel. Over the years he has registered patents and contacted the Herrera and Cuatro Vientos test lab.

By the mid-1930s, his work was mature enough that he decided to go a step further and create a prototype. The result is “Libélula Viblandi”, a name that combines Cantero’s surname with the surnames of his allies to produce it: engineer Pedro Blanco and mechanic Antonio Díaz. The brand liked the measures and it didn’t take long to retouch, and it was eventually reduced to the “Spanish Dragonfly”, a helicopter “made in Spain”.

The problem is that in 1935 Spain bad winds were blowing for projects like yours

winds of war

Patent No. 89820

Overnight, and with his martial art, the Madrid inventor found himself in a situation even more grotesque than the rotor tests he had to do in the garden of his Zamora home: How were the handfuls of kilometers separating him from his prototype? and the workshop became an insurmountable distance. hindered any progress possible.

When the war broke out, Cantero Villamil was in rebel-controlled territory. Libélula’s prototype is in his workshop in Republican Madrid. as detailed Independentthey even hid different parts of the prototype and engine in homes in the capital.

And so, what the complexity of the project or the scarcity of resources had failed to achieve, the war succeeded: “Libélula” chained a forced stop for three tragic years in which Spanish aviation suffered two other losses: the death of De la Cierva. and the exile of Herrera.

War may hit the brakes in Spain, but not in other countries. In mid-1936, the Focke-Wulf firm took the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 into flight, and three years later, at the end of the summer of 1939, Sikorsky made history with the Vought-Sikorsky VS-300. it was already fully practicable. Even by 1942, he had a design that could do it. industrial level production and in bulk.

The first model of Juan de la Cierva’s autogyro.

The lead train—or flight for that matter—had passed; but Cantero didn’t throw in the towel. He continued to work on his design, polishing it, perfecting the details. He received patent number 149788 for “Libélula Viblandi” in 1940, and three years later he completed a prototype that, according to the inventor’s estimation, could fly in low-altitude areas. But he had an almost greater foe against him than the straits of the 1920s or even the Civil War: post war autarky.

“I had a shortage of supplies right after the war because there was no capacity to import,” explains Federico Cantero Núñez, the engineer’s grandson. Spanish. Nor time. In December 1946, tuberculosis ended her life and finally put an end to her “Spanish Dragonfly” dream. Officially, its prototype never flew, but there are those who point out that it could be tested under very controlled conditions, including an anchor to the ground.

We have his photographs, his memory.

And the little things about what might have happened if the war hadn’t gotten into Cantero’s plans.

Pictures | Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (OEPM) and Eulogia Merle – Spanish Science and Technology Foundation