Original Item. One-of-a-Kind. We are offering an outstanding original concept art painting by Andy Whyte, who had a 40 year career at Sikorsky Aircraft, joining in 1952 and retiring in 1992. The majority of this time was as a senior senior preliminary design engineer in the Advanced Design department. He was involved with the creation of all of Sikorsky's production aircraft over these years. He also investigated many unusual aircraft concepts that never made it into production. Along the way, he followed an interest and skill in painting and became the company's primary artist for illustrating both production and conceptual aircraft.

Andy always had an interest in the history of the aviation industry. In the 1960s he worked with United Aircraft executives in setting up displays at what was to become the New England Air Museum. In 1995 Andy became the tenth member of the Sikorsky Historical Archives, following the founding members and the four Sikorsky brothers.

This is an outstanding piece of concept art for Sikorsky’s AARV, the Aerial Armored Reconnaissance Vehicle. In 1967 Sikorsky investigated new light-weight dual-hardness aircraft armor.  This promised to be much lighter than the armor then available and more effective at defeating ballistic threats.   In an unconventional approach, a concept was proposed to build a helicopter fuselage with this armor, rather than simply adding the armor parasitically around sensitive areas of the vehicle.

The painting depicts two AARVs in Vietnam with gunfire coming from multiple directions hitting the armor plating of the craft. There is some loss of sky in the top left corner, bending of the canvas in the top right corner, and some scuffing along the edges, but overall this had held up well. The painting is signed A. Whyte in the bottom left corner.

The painting is actually featured on Sikorsky’s website, found here. This is an outstanding opportunity to own a real documented piece of concept art for one of the most ambitious aircraft designs of the Vietnam War. 

An outstanding and simply badass painting, ready to frame and display!

Concurrently, Sikorsky was in the early stages of developing the Advancing Blade Concept (ABC) for extending the speed range of helicopters.  This used two very rigid counter-rotating rotors, allowing rotor lift at high speeds to migrate off the rotor centerline to the advancing sides of the rotor discs, thus eliminating retreating blade stall which limits the speed of conventional helicopters. 

Although the proposed armor fuselage vehicles would not need the speed capability of the ABC, it was quickly recognized that the rugged ABC rotor head had benefits for ballistic tolerance.  And ABC promised improved maneuverability over conventional helicopters.  These two ideas were combined into an aircraft with an armor fuselage and an ABC rotor system.

The ABC had the additional advantages of not requiring a tail rotor, and a design where the control swashplates for the two rotors were buried below the rotors, both further reducing the vulnerable area of the aircraft against ballistic threats. Two designs were considered.  The first was a two place reconnaissance vehicle, the AARV – Aerial Armored Reconnaissance Vehicle – proposed as a follow-on to the Army’s light observation helicopters then in production, the Hughes OH-6A and the Bell OH-58A.

This project involved both Army and company funds over a two and a half year period.  Army funding came from the Army Materials and Mechanics Research Center in Watertown, Mass, which was responsible for much of the development of the dual-hardness armor.  In phase 1 of the contract manufacturing techniques, including methods for cutting, joining, forming and finishing the material, were evaluated.  In phase 2, a simulated fuselage was fabricated and subjected to ballistics testing.