Vice President of the Sikorsky Archives John Bulakowski was not in the room two days before Christmas in 1976 when the call came into the Stratford company from the U.S. Army about the choice of the Black Hawk as its next all-purpose helicopter over the Bell Huey, which had been the Army’s workhorse during the Vietnam conflict.
But he was just down the hall, and word got out pretty quickly about the outcome of the call — including a mostly forgotten moment in Sikorsky lore when a company executive inadvertently hung up on Army brass and had to be quickly patched back through to get the good news.
The company had reached its 50th anniversary in 1973, with founder Igor Sikorsky having died only months before at age 83. But without the Black Hawk and its huge production run through to the present, Sikorsky veterans are skeptical the company would have survived many more years beyond 1973 with no other major military program in the offing at the time, let alone make it to its March 5, 2023, centennial.
