Bensen Aircraft Corporation, located near the Raleigh-Durham Airport, was incorporated in 1953 by Igor B. Bensen, at the invitation of North Carolina state officials. Bensen, son of an agricultural scientist who fled Russia shortly after the 1917 revolution, was educated in the University of Louvain, Belgium (1934-1937), the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N.J. (1937-1940), and Indiana University (Ph.D., 1968). After some years in the employ of the General Electric Corporation, Bensen resigned to study helicopter design under Igor I. Sikorsky (1889-1972), father of the multi-engine airplane and of the modern helicopter.

Bensen invented and manufactured at his Raleigh plant both the gyro-glider and the gyro-copter. Both were small, light-framed, single-passenger craft that were furnished with rotary blades that were kept in motion by air rather than by engine power. The gyro-copter, as opposed to the gyro- glider, was furnished with an additional propeller driven by a 60 or a 90-horsepower engine. Bensen Aircraft Corporation manufactured both kinds of aircraft and sold them in inexpensive kit form. In 1963, Bensen, using one of his gyro-copters, duplicated the first flight of the Wright brothers by taking off and flying at the same speed and height as the celebrated 1903 flight and using the same spots among the Kitty Hawk dunes for his flight. He dubbed the gyro-copter used for this feat, and subsequently, in 1969, gave it to the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum.