Best of the best Robinson Helicopter founder Frank Robinson

Frank Robinson passed away on 12 November at his Rolling Hills, California home. Robinson feigned insult when asked about his possible retirement at a packed 2009 Heli-Expo press conference. Why?” he shot back with a grin when asked about it. You know what the late comedian Jack Benny said when they asked him what he was going to do with all that money when he died? He said, If cannot take it with me, won’t go.’ He didn’t need a retirement and I think don’t, either.”

- By Athol Franz

However, the following year, at age 80, Robinson did retire from the iconic helicopter company he founded in 1973, turning control over to his son, Kurt. "Frank could do it all," Kurt Robinson said of his father. "He had a business sense, the engineering sense and the financial sense." He could do it all in part because he had to.

Frank Robinson founded his company at his kitchen table in 1973 with the goal of realising his college dream of producing simple, low-cost helicopters for the civilian market. Today, Robinson Helicopter is closing in on the delivery of its 14,000th helicopter. Robinson's interest in helicopters dates back to his childhood. "I was nine years old when I saw a newspaper picture of a Sikorsky VS-300 prototype hovering. I was intrigued that someone could make a machine that could stand motionless in the air," Robinson said.

He aimed his education and career path exclusively at helicopters, receiving his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington and later attending Wichita State's graduate aeronautical engineering school.

Robinson went on to work at various helicopter programmes at Cessna, Umbaugh, McCulloch, Kaman and Hughes, all the while unsuccessfully trying to foster his employers'interest in his idea for a low-cost 'everyman'helicopter while concurrently working on the concept in his spare time from his home workshop.