VTOL Military Research Aircraft

Britain's BAe Harrier, which has been in service for nearly twenty years, and the Soviet Union's Yak-38 Forger are the world's only successful operational Vertical Take-Off & Landing aircraft. These, together with the recently-flown Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey tiltrotor craft, represent the fruition of over forty years of frustrating trial and error in attempting to produce the ideal flying machine: one which combines the vertical take-off attributes of the helicopter with the speed and efficiency of the fixed-wing aircraft.
In VTOL Military Research Aircraft Mike Rogers has created the first comprehensive international history of VTOL experimentation and endeavour. Every one of the diverse types of aircraft involved is included, from tailsitters and ducted fans to tiltprops and tiltwings to liftjets and vectored jets.
Projects covered include the extraordinary but doomed family of turboprop- and jet-powered tailsitters (which took off in the manner of a rocket and had to be reversed on to the ground with the pilot looking over his shoulder) and the single-troop flying platforms (which proved wholly practical but sadly vulnerable to sniper fire). More successful were the XC-142 four-engine tiltwing troop transport, which came within a hair's breadth of taking the contract eventually won by the ubiquitous Lockheed Hercules, and the Fairey Rotodyne, which succumbed not to technical problems but to governmental intransigence.
To complement the text a fascinating collection of illustrations, both in colour and black & white, has been assembled. These include a series of specially drawn chronologies which graphically illustrate the relationship between the various projects and photographs or line drawings of the many aircraft that flew as VTOL projects.



by Mike Rogers
Published by Haynes/Foulis 1989 1st edition. 248pp profusely illustrated, index. 22x28 mint, including d/j.




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