Hello everyone! I am interested in aeronautics and other vehicles history. In this period I am specially intersted in the history of the Gregoire- Coanda turbine sled, that was builded for Grand Duke Kyrill. Is there a chance to have some pictures of this sled, or any reports of it? (excepting the articles and pictures from French newspapers in 1910). Are any mentions about the testing of this sled by Grand Duke Kyrill? Thank you!
After his Propulseur was displayed in Paris, Coanda was approached by Grand Duke Cyril to make a sled for the Russian royal family. The Emperor himself had several sleds, and starting in 1911, motor-sleigh races were held on the Svednaga Newka, a branch of the Newa River, and on the island of Krestowsky in the Newa, near St. Petersburg. Lacking an entry, the Grand Duke commissioned a sleigh from Franco-Romanian inventor Henri Coandã. Coanda built it immediately, with the help of a French boat manufacturer, Despujols, and the motor manufacturer Gregoire, Coandă supervised the building of a motor sled. Instead of a Clerget, he fitted it with a six-cylinder 30-HP Grégoire engine. The sled had the same inverted flower-pot front as the Propulseur plane, but the body was teardrop-shaped, with two recessed passenger seats at the rear and large snow runners underneath. One magazine wrote: "As the illustration shows, the main frame and body work, suggestive of a cucumber with one end in a tub; enclose the motor, reinforced, having two layers of material instead of one. The body of the sled is built to carry a turbine, in the specially formed funnel in the front, by which the sled is propelled. Thus, the vehicle is to be drawn, not pushed." The sled was exhibited at the Twelfth Automobile Salon of France, also at the Grand Palais, from December 3 to 18, 1910, and was written up in leading car magazines. One of the periodicals reported an expected speed of 60 mph (97 km/h) on the frozen Seine, but no account exists of the sled being tested. It was about 13.5 ft long, and was steered with an automobile steering wheel. The sled was baptized for Cyril by Russian Orthodox priests using an improvised altar at the Despujols plant near Paris on December 2, 1910 with Grand Duchess Victoria present as shown in photos. It's not clear that Cyril’s sled ever worked--no record has been found of an actual run. The Motor (magazine) only concluded that the sled was to be sent to Russia. It never turned up again, and certainly didn't survive the series of revolutions and wars that was to come. As for Coanda, he was no doubt a skilled aeronautical designer, and became a Romanian national hero (the airport in Bucharest is named after him).
