Jean Boulet’s first helicopter flight was almost his last.
It was September 21, 1947, and the 26-year-old Boulet was at the Camden, New Jersey, headquarters of Helicopter Air Transport, the world’s first commercial helicopter operator. He had earned an engineering degree from the École Polytechnique in Paris and had been a member of the French air force during World War II. After the liberation of France, the air force sent Boulet to the United States for fighter pilot training. He returned to France in 1946, but the war had ended and “there were many pilots and not enough planes,” Boulet told the author in an interview in the 1980s. “I didn’t think there was too much of a future for someone who had not flown during the war, so I left the air force.”
Despite the glut of former military pilots on the market and his relative lack of experience in the air, Boulet remained determined to make flying his career. “I started looking for civilian flying jobs and received a proposal from SNCASE [Société Nationale des Constructions Aéronautique du Sud-Est] which was just beginning to develop helicopters,” he said. “I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to do the job because I couldn’t fly helicopters, but they said nobody knew anything about flying them.”
SNCASE sent Boulet to Helicopter Air Transport, which also ran a training program for pilots, and that’s how he ended up in New Jersey and in the copilot seat of a Sikorsky S-51.
“The first day I saw a helicopter, I had my first ride and my first accident,” Boulet recalled. “The instructor did not have a lot of experience, and at the end of the flight
