George de Bothezat (Romanian: Gheorghe Botezatu, Russian: Георгий Александрович Ботезат; 7 June 1882 – 1 February 1940) was a Romanian-Russian American[2] engineer, businessman, and pioneer of helicopter flight.

[8] In 1911, he joined the Faculty of Shipbuilding from the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University,[3] and continued theoretical studies of flight along with Stephen Timoshenko, Alexey Lebedev and Alexander Vanderfleet.

[9][10] In 1914, de Bothezat accepted the position of director at the Polytechnical Institute in Novocherkassk, but the outbreak of World War I compelled him to return to Saint Petersburg and join the Technical Commission of the Imperial Russian Air Force.

In 1915, de Bothezat published standard bombing tables for the Air Forces, and in 1916 he was appointed chief of the Main Airfield in Saint Petersburg – Russia's first flight research facility.

In March 1923 Time magazine reported Thomas Edison sent Dr. Bothezaat a congratulations for a successful helicopter test flight.

[11] His 1936 book Back to Newton attacked Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and the whole world of contemporary academics "who are utterly unable to acquaint themselves with the subject".

[17] He worked for the film industry, designing mechanical special effects props for Dudley Murphy's The Love of Sunya (1927).