Bomber doctrine crowds out rotorcraft

Moving the early rotorcraft demonstration from McCook Field to the Navy's Chambers Field matters because influential Army Air Service officers judged aviation through a bomber-centred lens. Bombers were useful, but the claim that every air-power problem began and ended with them left little room for other aircraft. In that institutional culture, a fragile vertical-flight experiment struggles for funding even if its engineering has promise. A naval demonstration reaches leaders who need shipborne reconnaissance and can imagine missions outside strategic bombing. The counterfactual therefore turns on organizational attention as much as on technical feasibility.