The boundless ingenuity and invention of German engineers, however, was to be redeployed and nurtured once the Axis powers had been defeated and especially during the Cold War, when, as we will see, a VTOL fighter capable of tackling some of the very same missions originally plotted for these Nazi ‘science-fiction’ aircraft became both desirable and then a reality. That aircraft – the Harrier – was, of course, a jet. One wartime German design that was to use piston engines showed that there was an alternative route to vertical take-off and landing. This was the Focke-Achgelis Fa 269, a tilt-rotor VTOL fighter. In this design, a piston engine – BMW or Daimler-Benz – was to have been mounted in the fuselage behind the pilot. Transverse drive shafts were to set two giant propellers, one fitted in either wing, spinning downwards and so lifting the Fa 269 vertically like a helicopter. These would then pivot behind the wings and push the aircraft forward.
Much test work was carried out, using a wind tunnel, at the Focke-Achgelis works at Hoykenkamp in Lower Saxony, founded in 1937 to manufacture helicopters. The factory, however, was bombed heavily and work on the Fa 269 ended in 1944; Focke-Achgelis engineers were not exactly relieved, but they knew full well that the aircraft was unlikely to fly before 1947. Forty-two years later, the first US Bell Boeing V-22A Osprey took to the air; it had taken that long to make the Fa 269 concept a reality. Even then, the Osprey was beset by development problems and several machines crashed with fatal results during the 1990s. Although taken into service with the US Marine Corps in 2000, the Pentagon only sanctioned full-scale production as recently as 2005. Today, the Osprey operates with the Marines, the US Navy and the US Air Force. Like the Harrier, it can be based on land or fly from carriers at sea. It has seen action in rescue and combat roles in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan and has become, after a long, expensive, controversial and even tragic birth, one of the brightest stars in the constellation of current US military aircraft.
While the Osprey proves that the Harrier is not the only solution to vertical and/or short take-off and landing (V/STOL) flight, its role is and always will be quite different from that of the jump jet still flown, and enthusiastically so, by the US Marine Corps. The turboprop Osprey is a successful marriage of helicopter and aeroplane; it can seat twenty-four troops and has a top speed of around 300 mph. A combat US AV-8B Harrier is a single-seat interceptor and ground-attack fighter and flies close to the speed of sound. It nonetheless remains intriguing that this military tilt-motor aircraft, a type that might have made its debut in Germany in 1947, took to the air nearly thirty years after the Hawker P.1127.
Mention has to be made of one other type of Nazi German VTOL aircraft, although this one remains the stuff of apocryphal stories, bar-room tales, internet conspiracies and blurred photographs. Given the German proficiency in photography at the time, technically and artistically and in the most demanding theatres of war, it does seem odd that those involved in such specialist design were unable to take one half-decent snap of a flying saucer. Allegedly, a certain Dr Richard Mehta, ‘sometimes known as the “Father of Saucerology”’, according to a host of copy-cat websites, was hired by the Luftwaffe, or even by a secret branch of the SS, to build a ‘flying saucer’ to take out Allied bombers by rockets and, presumably, to take them by goggle-eyed surprise, too. Dr Mehta was, it seems, then recruited by the US after the war to work at Avro Canada, where he worked on classified designs for flying saucers.
In 1953, Avro Canada did, in fact, reveal a mock-up of a flying saucer, the Avrocar designed by John ‘Jack’ Frost, a British engineer who had arrived in 1947 from de Havilland, where he had been chief designer of the DH 108 Swallow, a small jet based on the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet. Flown by test pilot John Derry, DFC, a former RAF Typhoon pilot, the Swallow was the first British aircraft to push through the sound barrier. From 1952, Frost worked on the development of a new form of gas turbine, or what he called the ‘pancake engine’, with jet thrust exiting around the rim of the engine. This configuration led, naturally enough, to a machine with a central engine and exhausts all around its rim that did indeed look very much like a flying saucer.
Visiting US Air Force officials were clearly impressed, agreeing to fund the aircraft along with Avro Canada. Later on, the US Army came on board, and eventually, despite some terrifying tests with the proposed power plant – engine fires were endemic – the first Avrocar was completed at Avro Canada’s Malton plant, Ontario, in May 1959. A first free flight was achieved on 12 November 1959 – although, far from boldly going where no man had gone before, the Avrocar rose just a few feet above ground and wobbled precariously at a top speed of 35 mph. On 9 June 1961, a demonstration flight for USAF and NASA witnessed a second prototype lifting itself over a six-foot-wide ditch and flying at just under 25 mph. The scream of its exhaust was painful to anyone coming anywhere near the Frisbee-shaped aircraft, while the heat generated inside the cockpit was enough to melt instruments. Many Americans claim to have seen flying saucers spinning in the night skies above them in the years ‘Jack’ Frost toiled away north of their border trying to make this type of machine an earthly, as opposed to an extraterrestrial, reality. Whatever those many Americans saw – especially those abducted and subjected to X-rated probing by inquisitive visitors from other worlds – Avro Canada would have been able to assure them, categorically, that their UFOs were not from Planet Ontario. The project was cancelled by the US military in December 1961. By then, the Hawker P.1127 had been flying successfully for over a year.
Back in 1945, however, with Hitler and the Third Reich dead and disposed of, German ingenuity was being forcibly exported in human form to the Soviet Union and the United States and, to a lesser extent, to Great Britain and France. But if the Second World War was over, leaving sixty million dead in its devastating wake, a Third World War threatened almost immediately. This was not simply the result of a clash between political ideologies, of communism – ‘the Red Menace’ – versus freedom, democracy and capitalism; rather, it was due to the simple fact that Stalin’s Soviet Union had either invaded or controlled Eastern Europe, and from 1949, with its new-found ally, the People’s Republic of China, seemed hell-bent on some form of world domination. This is certainly how many ordinary people, as well as politicians and the military, felt in the West, and in fact they continued to do so right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. While the threat of the Cold War prompted the design and accelerated the development of an enormous variety of fast, powerful jet interceptors and fearsome long-range bombers to carry nuclear weapons, it also led to the genesis of the Hawker P.1127, an aircraft that the military thought of as almost effete in its early years. If there was to be a shooting war with the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and China, then most RAF and USAF officers, not to mention politicians and military strategists, believed this would be fought in the air with Mach 2 fighters and Mach 1 bombers, with guided missiles and stand-off nuclear weapons.
But such an insane contest would have seen the probable destruction of every key military airbase in Europe, East and West, if not the kind of Armageddon that many feared and was so brilliantly satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove, in which a crazed, cowboy hat-toting US pilot, Major ‘King’ Kong, signalled the end of the world by riding an H-bomb like some bucking bronco onto a Russian target from his Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. Any air force units that survived might only be able to take to the contaminated skies again to protect what was left of democratic Europe in aircraft that could be operated from a secret bunker, road or forest clearing. And if they were to do so, discreetly, suddenly and unexpectedly, those aircraft would need V/STOL capability. Which is why, even while the main thrust of military aircraft development in the US, USSR, Britain and France was towards conventional supersonic jets requiring sophisticated and high-maintenance airbases, the dream – fast becoming a necessity – of VTOL and V/STOL flight was harboured in the late 1940s, nurtured throughout the 1950s and became a real
ity in the 1960s.
Winston Churchill, the British wartime premier who had done so much to help destroy Hitler, the odious Nazi regime and all its ‘perverted science’, was on the attack again mere months after the defeat of Germany and Japan. On 5 March 1946, now Leader of the Opposition in Britain, he gave a speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.
The term ‘iron curtain’ was not new. Writing in Das Reich in spring 1945, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, expressed concern at agreements made by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the Yalta Conference that February to carve up Europe after the imminent German defeat, and made the point that ‘an iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered’. If this was rather rich coming from a man who himself condoned the savage and senseless slaughter of millions of hapless people, Goebbels was not altogether wrong. As the war drew towards its appropriately Gotterdammerung-style finale in Europe, senior Nazis outdid one another in seeking last-ditch alliances with the Allies, who they believed were, at heart, as fiercely anti-communist and anti-Stalin as they were. While there was more than a grain of truth in this, the Allies were determined to force Nazi Germany into an unconditional surrender and, as this required the full force of the Red Army and a huge sacrifice from the Soviet Union in terms of human life, no one in Britain or the United States in their right political mind in 1945 was going to turn against Stalin at that point. Indeed, such was the support for good old ‘Uncle Joe’ that Churchill’s iron curtain speech was widely condemned. Churchill despised Stalin and communism as much as he loathed Hitler and Nazism. And yet, he was one of the very politicians who, even if he had little choice in the matter, had allowed the iron curtain to descend in the first place.
The reality of this new political divide in Europe was soon evident. In June 1948, Stalin blockaded Berlin in a blatant attempt to isolate the city, cutting its transport links to West Germany and so to supplies from the Allied powers – Britain, France and the United States. These, along with the Soviet Union, had been the occupying nations in Berlin, a city geographically stranded since the Nazi surrender in the new Democratic Republic of Germany. An iron curtain had indeed descended around Berlin, and the one way in was by air. In a spirited and defiant rescue operation that lasted the best part of a year, Allied aircraft flew 200,000 missions bringing food and supplies to Berlin, for the loss, through accidents, of seventeen US and eight British aircraft and the death of 101 military personnel and civilians.
NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was founded the following year: its mission, according to Lord Ismay, its first secretary-general, ‘to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down’. The Russians retaliated with the establishment of the Warsaw Pact in 1955. In between, the United Nations went into battle, with South Korea against North Korea and its backer, China, in the Korean War of 1950–53. The United States was to be militarily engaged, in one part of the world or another, from then on and up until the present day.
It was the US Navy that made the first demand, in 1948, for VTOL aircraft and, curiously given the nature and design of aircraft carriers, it asked for tail-sitters. The idea, however, was for these fighters to operate from platforms mounted on the afterdecks of cruisers and destroyers. So where a warship might have been equipped with a helicopter, now it might carry its own high-speed fighter escort on patrol and into battle. On paper, at least, the idea seemed attractive. It led to two dramatic, if profoundly flawed, prototypes that the US Navy was to abandon in the mid-1950s. If nothing else, the Convair XFY Pogo and the Lockheed XFV put paid to the tail-sitter concept. The wonder of it is that these two rival experimental VTOL fighters performed as well as they did. From a practical point of view, however, they would have made precious little sense operating at sea in anything other than the calmest conditions. At the same time, it was always going to be hard for even the most athletic pilot to scramble in anything like a hurry into or out of the cockpit of one of these turboprop-powered machines – not least because he would have had to clamber up some sort of gantry and then shift himself from the vertical plane to the horizontal, like an astronaut manoeuvring himself into a space capsule. And as for coming in to land at sea, this was trying at the very best of times, even for the most experienced test pilots, and would have been fairly hellish for less specialized service pilots, especially in poor weather and low light with the sea – and warship – rolling and pitching.
The Lockheed XFV was the first of the two into the air, on 23 December 1953, flown by Lockheed’s chief test pilot, Herman ‘Fish’ Salmon, although its maiden flight was little more than a tentative 40-foot hop. It was powered by a 5,332 hp Allison YT-40-A-14 turboprop that drove three-bladed contra-rotating propellers. This gave insufficient power to allow the Lockheed to take off vertically, and so all thirty-two test flights were made with the help of a temporary, clip-on and non-retractable undercarriage that enabled the ‘Pogo Stick’, as Lockheed staff dubbed the aircraft, to take off conventionally from a runway. It landed this way, too. Transitions from horizontal to vertical flight and back were made in the air. No attempts were made to land the aircraft vertically, although it could hover – just – in mid-air. In this configuration – in fact, in nearly all configurations – the dangling XFV would have been a sitting duck for enemy aircraft and ship’s gunners. In any case, the XFV was uncomfortable to fly and lacked anything like the performance of contemporary US Air Force and Navy jets. Although there was talk of a 7,100 hp version of the Allison engine that would have boosted performance, there seemed little point in pushing further ahead with a type of aircraft that was clearly wrong-headed.
In contrast, the Convair XFY Pogo achieved some success. A more compact machine than Lockheed’s, its 5,500 hp Allison YT-40-A-16 engine gave it sufficient thrust to take off vertically, and on 5 November 1954 Lieutenant Colonel James F. ‘Skeets’ Coleman made a successful transition from vertical to forward flight and back again to land vertically, and safely. It had been a noteworthy achievement, although it was more of a conjuring act than a performance the US Navy would really have wanted its pilots to enact day to day, at sea and in combat. A colour film of this first twenty-minute flight, made under a deep-blue sky from the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Brown Field, California, is oddly moving. While watching it, I read a note – it could have been written by a comedian – to the effect that Convair had provided the pilot with twenty-five feet of rope to shin down if he had to make an emergency landing away from base. Something interesting had been achieved with this stubby, delta-winged fighter, but to what purpose in an age of fast and competent jet fighters that could shoot off from the decks of the existing carrier fleet? The Pogo continued to fly until November 1956, by which time the US Navy had lost interest in tail-sitters. Happily, both the Convair and Lockheed prototypes have been preserved, although neither is ever likely to hop, let alone fly, again.
What these tests, and earlier experiments, confirmed was that a practical VTOL design should be as close in general arrangement to a conventional aircraft as possible, and that it should be provided with the same amount of power that by the mid-1950s jets were well able to deliver. The first VTOL jet, however, also took off with the nose pointing skywards, although, unlike the turboprops from Lockheed and Convair, the Ryan X-13 Vertijet was suspended off the ground by a nylon cable hanging from the bright-yellow ramp of the lorry-mounted trailer that carried this compact, delta-wing machine. The
ramp was raised from the horizontal to the vertical by hydraulic arms. The pilot, left dangling above the ground, was to fire up the X-13’s powerful Rolls-Royce Avon jet and to release the hook holding the nose of the aircraft as he applied power and then made a quick transition to forward flight. Coming in to land, the X-13 was brought back to the vertical and lowered close to the ground, where the pilot would manoeuvre it back to the trailer ramp, hook up and switch off. Mission accomplished.
This was a complex way of going about VTOL flight, and yet the X-13 did exactly what it was asked to do. As did Bell’s X-14. There is a delightful promotional film shot by the company on 11 April 1957 to demonstrate the progress it made with this experimental aircraft that year. Resembling a mechanical moth, the silver machine, which had been commissioned by the USAF, performs faultlessly from and over Edwards Air Force Base, California – a performance repeated that summer in front of the Pentagon for an invited crowd of three thousand military officials, politicians and journalists. The precise nature of the flying, and the obvious control the pilot had over the experimental aircraft, were due in part to the vectored thrust of the jet engines and the provision of ‘puffers’, or jet reaction controls, housed in the wing-tips. It was also down to the great skill of Bell’s test pilot, Peter Gerard, a highly experienced glider pilot who, raised on a Californian cattle ranch, studied mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and flew B-24 Liberator bombers with the USAF during the Second World War. Gerard lived to the ripe old age of ninety-two, his soul slipping into the blue yonder in 2011. On 24 November 1953, he had been the first man to hover in vertical flight, although this was at the controls of a test rig, rather than an aircraft, that Bell had been working on since 1947.
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