For entrant in Sikorsky helicopter contest, a lift of faith

Neil Saiki, a Santa Cruz engineer, has plenty of rotor rooters as he chases the $250,000 Igor I. Sikorsky Prize, to be awarded to whoever comes up with a human-powered copter capable of hovering for 1 minute and rising 3 meters.

So far, nobody has come up with a muscle-driven machine capable of hovering for 1 minute and rising 3 meters — requirements for the Igor I. Sikorsky Prize, an honor the helicopter industry has dangled before aeronautics buffs for 32 years. The prize has been offered so long that the booty, initially $10,000, became embarrassingly small. Now it's $250,000 and still unclaimed.

That's the frustrating story of human-powered helicopters and the prize coveted by virtually everyone who has designed the cumbersome beasts and tried to get them aloft.

"We're so interested in bigger and faster, we're so used to going to the moon or looking at stars that are light years away that this goes against the grain," he says. "But it's one of the last aviation frontiers."

The Sikorsky has gnawed at him since 1989, when he led a team at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo that built the first muscle-driven chopper to get off the ground. But the 7.1-second flight, which soared all of 8 inches off the floor of a Cal Poly gym, wasn't nearly enough to take home the prize.

Still, it was a heady day. Onlookers cheered as Greg McNeil, a fellow engineering student and bike racer, pedaled furiously. Saiki, grasping a safety rope at the end of a 100-foot rotor, urged him on, twirling his hand over his head and yelling, "Up! Up! Up!" Clad in a white dinner jacket and black bow tie, Saiki looked as if he had sauntered in on his way to the prom. "If you're setting a world's record," he explained in an interview decades later, "you might as well look good."

But Saiki still didn't have the Sikorsky, and it bugged him. After graduating from Cal Poly with a master's degree in aeronautical engineering, he worked for NASA but soon turned entrepreneurial. He invented a hanging cot for climbers and designed high-end mountain bikes — but the Sikorsky was always churning in his imagination, just out of reach.

For a while, he tried his hand at creating another entry for the Sikorsky sweepstakes. In 1994, five years after the DaVinci III lifted off oh so briefly, his ongoing dream went up in smoke: A forest fire swept through his workshop near San Luis Obispo, destroying the Penguin, another human-powered chopper he'd been building with high hopes.

A trim man with a passion for rock climbing and samurai swords, Saiki sold his house in 2006 to start Zero Motorcycles, a pioneering manufacturer of electric cycles in Santa Cruz. In a management shake-up last year, he left Zero, saying he wanted to spend more time with his four children ages 1 to 11. He also announced — unsurprisingly, to those who knew him — that he intended to build a human-powered helicopter.

"I've always wanted to go back and have another try at it," Saiki said. "Now I've got the time, and I don't have the day-to-day financial pressures."

So far, Saiki has spent more than $100,000 to create the craft he calls the Upturn. He works in his garage, has ultra-lightweight parts fabricated all over the country and runs tests at a friend's private hangar, far from prying eyes. This summer, he hopes to make his bid in front of witnesses appointed by the American Helicopter Society International, the prize's sponsor.