The God Machine: From Boomerangs to Black Hawks: The Story of the Helicopter [Paperback]

James R. Chiles' The God Machine takes an important place among a very small literature on a vital piece of modern technology - the helicopter.

Writings about or involving helicopters are plentiful. A Google search using helicopter and history turns up more than 10 million hits. Doing the same for just books in Amazon.com turns up over 12,000 and almost a thousand at Barnes & Noble. However, when you try to find just those that make any real effort to cover the breadth and depth of the subject -- the ideas underlying, development, application, and impact of this technology - numbers drop to a handful. Among those, most are either dated - which only takes a few years, given the pace of change in the world -- or focus solely on military aspects. So, even if it did nothing more than just try to cover the waterfront, The God Machine would be a valuable book.

In fact, Chiles has gone well beyond that. He's presented key issues and a fair amount of technical information in terms that almost any lay reader can understand. An example is his discussion of the problem of controlling a helicopter in a hover - the invaluable characteristic that distinguishes it from almost all other aircraft. He explains how this problem frustrated early visionaries and inventors and how it was finally overcome - down to the specific hardware involved and how it works this magic.

In taking a broad view, Chiles also discusses the huge gaps between vision and reality that have been a persistent part of the story. One of these gaps involved the idea of a simple, cheap device that would displace the family car and reduce increasing congestion on highways. This vision butted against the reality of a technology that defied finding a practical combination of cost, capability, and reliability that could put the product in the hands of the masses. He shows how these same factors restricted ownership and use to the wealthy, companies, and public agencies meeting special needs. He shows how various inventors tried, always unsuccessfully, to overcome these obstacles.

Chiles also shows how the helicopter achieved a unique place in meeting special needs - especially for the military and in such activities as arctic exploration, servicing offshore oil platforms, civilian search-and-rescue, and real-time news gathering. He also shows how evolving social and political contexts have shaped attitudes toward helicopters - especially opposition to their noise, as well as concerns about government spying on private citizens.

Finally he shows, as in the case of helicopters rescuing mountain climbers in Alaska, how availability of this technology has sometimes led to a false sense of security and personal recklessness that the public winds up paying the bills for.

While this book lacks citation to sources for specific information, as one who has worked extensively on history involving helicopters, I know that Chiles has also made accessible to general readers information found only in some rare and expensive sources. Beyond that, he's drawn on interviews with and direct observation of helicopter pilots and users - to the extent of having learned to fly a helicopter himself. Anecdotes flowing from these sources give his writing an immediate, human touch that increases entertainment, as well as informational value.

No book will ever be the last word on rotorcraft, but The God Machine certainly meets a real need. If you want to or can buy only one book on helicopters, this is the one.

[Dr. James W. Williams is the former U.S. Army Aviation Branch Historian and author of A History of Army Aviation: From Its Beginnings to the War on Terror (2005)]

Mr. Chiles has produced one of the finest books on a very intergal part of our society. I know how important the helicopter is as I flew many hours in them while in Vietnam as a 19 year old Airborne Infantryman working for a Long Range Patrol Team, 1966 & 1967. Mr. Chiles' research was very thorough as he provides background and insight into this amazing piece of aeronautical wizadry. I for one am very impressed and appreciative of Mr. Chiles approach to the subject as the helicopter has changed so many aspects of our lives. Good book, one to own and well worth the time to read. Thank you Mr. Chiles for all the hard work.

From humankind's early aspirations to fly by flapping wings of wax and feathers to the roar and flap-flap-flap of today's sophisticated helicopters in war, civilian transport, construction, logging, mercy flights and search and rescue, Jim Chiles pens a sophisticated and entertaining history of "The God Machine." All of the technical matter necessary to understand choppers, how they developed and how they fly, comes clearly and easily to the non-mechanical readers as well to helicopter engineers, thanks to Chiles' skilled exposition and his deep research into the wingless mechanisms we often see in daily life, news reports, and adventure films. "The God Machine" promises to add value to any library, including those in homes where parents leave good books out to tempt offspring into reading and therefore expanding their mental life. In short, "The God Machine" is a fact book for all, a worthy read on a fascinating subject, a book that uplifts your knowledge and raises your awareness of one of humanity's engineering marvels.

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