Commentary: A World Without the Vertical Flight Society
A World Without the Vertical Flight Society
Take a moment and imagine a world without the Vertical Flight Society
By Angelo Collins
VFS Executive Director
From Vertiflite, May/June 2026
A layperson sees a helicopter overhead and feels a sense of awe, but they don’t see the decades of research, collaboration, failure, and persistence that made that moment possible. Unlike any other organization in aerospace, VFS is not adjacent to the vertical flight ecosystem. It is woven into it.
Without the Society, vertical flight would still exist, but it would not look the same, and technologies would not have evolved as rapidly as they have.
In the early days, pioneers like Igor Sikorsky, Army test pilots like H. Franklin Gregory and U.S. Army leaders helped bring the first practical helicopter, the XR-4, from concept to reality in the early 1940s. But what accelerated that progress wasn’t just invention, it was a community of engineers, pilots, and advocates aligned around a shared belief that vertical flight mattered. That community became the American Helicopter Society.
Now consider everything that followed.
Would the UH-60 Black Hawk program have matured as quickly without decades of shared research, test data, and professional exchange? Would Frank Piasecki have advanced tandem rotor design into what became the CH-47 Chinook without the early AHS network he helped build? Would Charlie Kaman have developed the K-MAX, the highest payload fraction helicopter ever fielded, without the technical foundation and peer engagement the Society enabled?
The tiltrotor did not emerge in isolation. Engineers like Troy Gaffey built on years of VFS published work, technical exchange at Forum, and direct collaboration, moving from solving instability in the XV-3. Troy found the solution dubbed the “X-Mode”, which led to shaping the XV-15 and ultimately the V-22. Today’s Future Vertical Lift programs, including the MV75, trace part of their lineage through that same continuum of shared knowledge and community through the Society.
Without VFS, that continuum breaks, and it’s not just aircraft. Without the Society’s advocacy, would the Army have sustained the level of investment in vertical flight science and technology that it has over decades? Would key research infrastructure, academic pipelines, and collaborative agreements, like the Army–NASA partnerships and the Vertical Lift Research Centers of Excellence, exist in the same form?
Would DARPA programs in VTOL have the same depth of talent, Dan Newman, Ashish Bagai, drawn from a community that grew up publishing, debating, and learning through VFS? Would the modern eVTOL industry look the same, without the early Technical Vertical Flight (TVF) events that drew in Marc Moore, JoeBen Bevirt, without the NASA Ames community, without the mentorship and technical grounding that shaped its leaders?
Even our future workforce would look different. Over $2.1 million in Vertical Flight Foundation scholarships would not have been awarded. Thousands of students would not have entered this field. And perhaps most critically, our collective knowledge would be fragmented.
There would be no central library of over 16,000 vertical flight papers. No singular venue capable of publishing and curating the depth and specificity of research that defines our discipline. No Forum where the full ecosystem—industry, government, and academia—comes together with a shared purpose. Many of the collaborations, programs, and even careers that define vertical flight today began with a conversation at a VFS event. Take that away, and the gaps are everywhere.
So yes, a world without VFS might still have helicopters. But it would have fewer of them. They would be less capable. They would have arrived later. And the community behind them would be smaller, less connected, and far less impactful. That is the quiet power of this Society. Eighty-two years in, we are not just reflecting on history, we are actively shaping what comes next.
So the real question is not what vertical flight would look like without VFS. It’s what we will build together because it exists. I look forward to seeing many of you at Forum 82 in West Palm Beach, where the next chapter of vertical flight will be written. Let’s make history this week.
What do you think? Let us know!
Posted: 2026-04-23