Serge Eugene Gluhareff, fifty four, who was a pioneer designer of amphibious planes and helicopters with Igor Sikorsky died January 8th 1958 at Fairfield State Hospital in Newtown, Connecticut.
Mr. Gluhareff and his brother, Michael, who holds patents on dart-shaped aircraft designs, came to this country in 1924 and both joined the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corp., in Westbury, L. I., as engineering draftsmen. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, the two brothers built and flew their own gliders in Finland where they lived and went to school from 1919 to 1924.
On his retirement for reasons of health in 1954, Mr. Gluhareff held the position of assistant engineering manager of the Sikorsky Aircraft Division of United Aircraft Corp. During his long assosciation with the pioneering designer, Igor Sikorlsky, Mr. Gluhareff was engineering supervisor at the Sikorsky plant in College Point, L. I., then executive engineer and later assistant engineering manager in charge of research and development at Stratford.
He was project engineer for development of the first successful single-engine amphibian built in the United States, the S-39, which came ot of te Sikorsky plant in 1928. He was also project engineer on the first four-engine "Clipper" flying boats built for Pan American Airways in 1930, the S-40, S-42 and S-44, as well as the twin-engined S-34 and S-36 used by the United States Navy in the early '30s.
Mr. Gluhareff took flying lessons at Roosevelt Field on Long Island in 1925 and held pilot certificate number 1295. After his marriage in 1941 he stopped flying except for testing the early Sikorsky helicopters which he helped develop. He and Mr. Sikorsky made many test flights over the fields of Stratford in the VS-300, the first helicopter to be flown successfully in the Western Hemisphere.
He was a member of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, a former member of the AHS, a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers, the Connecticut Association of Professional Engineers, and was also active in the Gideon Society of Bridgeport and other religious groups.