The Impact of Helicopters on our lives

Most of us spend little time thinking about the impact that the helicopter has on our lives – except perhaps when we are listening to the traffic report on our local radio station as we are rushing to class or to work. But helicopters have revolutionized a number of areas of modern life from the way in which we drive to the way in which we treat heart-attack victims to the way in which we fight wars.
There are a wide range of helicopters from diminutive two-seaters to massive military carriers. Both size and shape are in large measure determined by the mechanics of being rotary-wing aircraft (as opposed to the “fixed wings” of airplanes). All helicopters operate by producing thrust through the blades of a main rotor that spin above the body (or fuselage) of the helicopter. As the main set of paired blades rotate, they create an airflow above them. This in turn creates lift, which raises the helicopter off the ground. The same rotor blades that provide the lift can be controlled by the pilot to determine the direction that the helicopter moves – forward, backward, sideways. Although helicopters fly much less quickly than the faster fixed-wing aircraft, the fastest helicopters can achieve speeds of over 200 mph (Crawford 14).
Helicopters serve important functions in both civilian and military arenas. Although the ways in which they are put to use in these two different arenas of American life are substantially different from each other at least on a superficial level, the ways in which helicopters are used almost always arise from the fact that the mechanics of the rotary-wing aircraft allow it to land in and take off from a small area and their ability to maneuver with far more precision than a fixed-wing aircraft. Because of these abilities, helicopters are used for everything from providing information about traffic to drivers (and therefore in at least some cases lessening the congestion of city streets and freeways), providing news coverage for events like wildfires that could not safely be covered in any other way, getting executives from one meeting to another and – most dramatically – getting sick and injured people to the place where they can receive the best possible medical care.
Helicopters often act as airborne ambulances that are not affected by red lights or traffic jams that might prove to fatal to a patient. They often prove to be especially effective for patient transport from accidents on freeways, where there is space for the helicopters to land and the nature of the injuries often requires immediate transportation to a trauma center. However, without denying the usefulness of helicopters in urban or suburban settings, they can be even more useful in rural settings in which the nearest medical facility may be at least an hour away by car. In general, helicopters may be used for transportation of patients under the following conditions:
· When transport time is greater than 15 minutes by ambulance.
· When transport time is greater by ground than by air.
· When patient extrication time is greater than 20 minutes.
· When utilization of local ground ambulance leaves community without coverage (http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/5196/nowhere.html)
Transportation of individuals needing medical care is the one arena in which the use of helicopters in military and civilian arenas overlap significantly: Military helicopters have saved thousands of lives in wars and battles since Korea (McKinney and Ryan 41).
The U.S. military, like other high-tech militaries around the world, uses the helicopter in a number of different ways, from transporting troops to remote arenas so that they can fight or perform reconnaissance to picking up the wounded to bring them home to collecting intelligence from the air. The use of helicopters to collect on-the-ground (as it were) information compensates in significant ways for the remote nature of so much current military intelligence-gathering and combat.
Although their importance (to the U.S. armed forces) in all military engagements since the Korean War should not be dismissed, it is arguable that the helicopter made the most difference in the war in Vietnam, helping U.S. troops overcome at least to some significant degree the disadvantages that they had in numbers of troops and in lack of familiarity with the terrain.
One of the most important elements of U.S. strategy in Vietnam was to cut away the cover that the lushness that the Southeast Asian jungle provided:
To counter the cover and concealment that the jungles provided, the American forces conducted defoliant operations, such as Operation Ranch Hand, which sprayed large quantities of agents White and Orange in order to rob the enemy’s natural safe havens of their foliage cover (Jorgenson 8).

These operations were carried out in large measure by using helicopters, which served in general as the warhorses of this conflict.
In top-secret operations, air force helicopters and planes dropped sensitive acoustic and seismic snopping devices along the major infiltration routes to help get a better understanding o just how many soldiers and equipment were being brought into South Vietnam (Jorgenson 9).

Vietnam allowed the armed forces to fight in new ways, and if the American forces were unsuccessful in that conflict, they took what they had learned and applied it in a number of conflicts since then, including the current war in Iraq.