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​Preproduction: ​1988 Skystorm
​​Guy Cassaday (Vehicle Designer) discusses finding the inspiration for the 1988 Skystorm. He discusses the challenges of building the working rotor retraction mechanism, and drawing vs. building when ideating. He walks through the process of building: using a wooden pattern to form the shape, using a vacuform machine to pull styrene (a plastic more formally known as polystyrene) down over the wood shapes, and finally cutting them out. This was the last model Guy would build at Hasbro. Going forward, the model shop would build everything using very tight control drawings from the designers.
Guy's 1988 G.I. Joe Skystorm X-Wing Chopper was inspired by an aircraft design that never actually flew – Sikorsky's X-Wing concept. This experimental aircraft has a long and complex history. The Rotor Systems Research Aircraft (RSRA) was developed by Sikorsky for NASA and the Army in the 1970s. It was a pure research aircraft "developed to fill the void between design analysis, wind tunnel testing, and flight results of rotor aircraft." [1] The RSRA project began in 1970 was airborne by 1976. In 1981, NASA and the Army solicited proposals for fitting a four-bladed main rotor to the RSRA. Sikorsky proposed fitting a UH-60A main rotor to the RSRA. The public roll-out of the RSRA/X-wing occurred on August 19, 1986 [2], even through the plane had never flown in this configuration. "The plan was to then fly it first with two rotor blades, followed by four blades, with the rotors stopped. By mid-1987 the RSRA was scheduled to fly with the rotor/wing turning at full speed, and by year’s end the rotor/wing was to be stopped and started in flight." The US Government laid waste to those plans in 1987, terminating the contract in favor of funding other higher priorities.
​To learn more read here. 
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