Education
He was educated at the Escuela Especial de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos at Madrid, where he spent six years, and studied on his own the works of F. W. Lanchester and N. Joukowski on theoretical aerodynamics
He was educated at the Escuela Especial de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos at Madrid, where he spent six years, and studied on his own the works of F. W. Lanchester and N. Joukowski on theoretical aerodynamics
He entered a competition for military airplane designs for the government and built a biplane bomber with three engines, using an airfoil section of his own design, developed mathematically. Tested in May 1919, the plane crashed when the pilot stalled it.
Cierva turned to rotary-wing design after this experience, as a solution to the problem of safety. His first three machines were failures, but with the change made in the fourth machine from rotor blades rigidly fixed to the hub to blades freely hinged, the first successful autogiro became a fact. It was flown for 200 yards (183 meters) on Jan. 19, 1923, and three public flights were made on January 21, the longest being a complete circuit of two and one-half miles (4 km) in about three and one-half minutes. By 1925 he had solved most of the problems of the autogiro, and in that year the Cierva Autogiro Company, Ltd., was formed in England, with Cierva acting as its technical director; Cierva also collaborated closely with the Autogiro Company of America after its foundation in 1929. On Sept. 18, 1928, he flew one of his machines across the English Channel, and in 1930 he flew an autogiro from England to Spain. He demonstrated the autogiro at the National Air Races in Cleveland in 1929. Cierva was killed in the crash of an air liner at Croyden, England, on Dec. 9, 1936.