Background
William Wallace Kellett was born on December 20, 1891 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, the son of William W. Kellett and Frances Revere (Flagler) Kellett. His family was wealthy.
William Wallace Kellett was born on December 20, 1891 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, the son of William W. Kellett and Frances Revere (Flagler) Kellett. His family was wealthy.
William Wallace Kellett attended Chestnut Hill Academy, Philadelphia, and then Princeton, graduating with a bachelor of letters in 1913.
Kellett worked for a year at the Liquid Carbonic Company, in Kansas City, Missouri, but left when World War I broke out to become an ambulance driver with the American Field Service. Later he became a pilot in the French air force. His wartime experience gave Kellett a lifelong enthusiasm for aviation. In 1919 he became a distributor for several aircraft manufacturing firms, and he was the first operator of Roosevelt Field on Long Island, from which Charles A. Lindbergh took off on his historic flight to Paris in 1927.
He joined the Seversky Aircraft Corporation (renamed Republic in 1939) when it was founded in 1931, and became its president in 1939. He was made chairman of the board in 1943 but resigned two years later to devote himself fully to his own company, the Kellett Aircraft Corporation. Chartered in Delaware in 1929, the company had its plant in Philadelphia, where it made autogiros of a type invented in 1923 by the Spanish aeronautical engineer Juan de la Cierva y Cordornia. Kellett produced the second autogiro certified by the Civil Aeronautics Authority, the Model K-2, in July 1931.
The autogiro, developed to eliminate the danger of stall in conventional airplanes, had a rotor and blades like a helicopter, but in the autogiro these rotated freely to provide lift, with forward motion provided by a conventional aircraft engine. Its principal contribution to aviation was to pave the way for the more versatile helicopter, finally developed in practical form by Igor Sikorsky in 1939. In all, only ninety autogiros were produced in America over a period of about fifteen years, so that Kellett's company was a small-scale operation through the 1930's. It became the Kellett Autogiro Corporation in 1932 but reverted to its original name eleven years later, by which time the autogiro was demonstrably an aeronautical dead end. He was appointed a member of the Aviation Council of Pennsylvania in 1937. He also served as president of Republic Aviation Corporation from 1939 and chairman of the board from 1943.
Kellett continued to make autogiros for the United States Air Force until 1942. In 1943 a Kellett autogiro began daily mail delivery between Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, the first and only service of its kind in the United States. With the outbreak of World War II, Kellett's business expanded. It was engaged chiefly in making aircraft parts but also contributed to the development of helicopters. By the end of the war the Kellett Aircraft Corporation was one of the principal American designers of helicopters, although it did not manufacture on the same scale as Sikorsky or Bell.
William Wallace Kellett was well known as the founder of the Kellett Aircraft Corporation. He had to his credit a one-man helicopter and a twin-engine model capable of carrying ten passengers and a crew of two, or a ton of freight. He pioneered with stabilization controls and gyroscopic controls against torque, and at the time of his death was experimenting with jet-propelled helicopters for the Air Force. But his most important contribution to the development of the helicopter was in training and providing opportunities for the first generation of helicopter engineers, including such prominent men as W. Laurence Le Page and Frank Piasecki. For his service during World War I, he received a Corps d'Armée citation and an Italian Service Medal.
Kellett served a term as president of the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America, the predecessor of the present Aerospace Industries Association. He was also a member of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences.
On March 10, 1928, Kellett married Virginia Fink; they had no children.
