>>370640http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-flying-winnebago-3672/?no-istBy James R. Chiles
Air & Space Magazine
January 2012
The Flying Winnebago
For some reason the heli-camper never really caught on.
Halfway through World War II, Igor Sikorsky wrote an article in The Atlantic that laid out a vision for postwar weekend travel. The future was rotorcraft, as in middle-class families owning a helicopter for country getaways. Four years later, Ruth and Latrobe Carroll published a children’s book, The Flying House, picturing an amphibious helicopter that could touch down in a forest glade or on a mountain lake. The Carrolls imagined their family copter with a porch, a shingled roof, sash windows, and a crooked stovepipe.
In the 1970s, the Itasca Division of Winnebago Industries actually built, certified, and sold the flying and floating Heli-Camper, advertised as “the most dramatic, comfortable, convenient and unique RV in the world.” (Floats were optional, though, and the porch was more of a screened awning that scrolled out for use with lawn chairs.) In the late 1970s, the lumbering offspring of a joint effort by Winnebago and Orlando Helicopter Airways, renamed Heli-Home, appeared on TV, starred in an RV trade show, and fluttered onto the pages of Time, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science.
