The period from the end of WWII to the early 1960s was a time of massive change in the defense sector. Things that seem commonplace today like supersonic jet fighters, nuclear submarines and guided missiles all were either invented or came of age during this period.
I find this period so interesting because there was a lot of “anything goes” when it came to design. Some of it was good, some of it wasn’t, and some was just plain weird.
Part of this was due to good old-fashioned inter service rivalry. The Army, Navy and newly created Air Force were all fighting for a seat at the nuclear table.
Submarine launched cruise missiles actually were a pretty good idea. It’s just that the technology hadn’t caught up yet.
Resembling a fighter jet minus its cockpit, the Regulus missile could be launched by a submarine and carry a nuclear warhead 500 miles to a target. There was only one catch. To fire the Regulus, the submarine first had to surface. Then the missile would be unloaded from a sealed hangar so that it could be fired. But that’s not all. The submarine had to stay surfaced while it guided the missile to its target. Now I’m an Air Force guy but that seems to defeat the whole purpose of, you know, a submarine.
The Russians came up with something similar along with some truly bizarre looking missiles and submarines to carry them. I’m not an expert on submarines but these look like they would be both slow and noisy.
These were rendered obsolete once effective submarine launched ballistic missiles were developed in the early 1960s. There are still cruise missiles carried by submarines, but they are tactical in nature and not part of a strategic nuclear deterrent.
For a time in the 1950s we were very worried that our airfields would be vulnerable to a surprise attack. It was thought that if we could somehow build fighters that could take off vertically, they could be dispersed far from vulnerable runways.
The need for an aircraft that could takeoff and land vertically led to some interesting ideas.
Convair’s XFY “Pogo” actually solved the problem by sitting on its tail. This seemed like an elegant solution but was exceedingly difficult to fly. The pilot had to look over his shoulder to land it.
The Lockheed XFV-1 looked a lot like the Pogo but never got quite as far along in testing.
The Navy actually wanted to equip smaller ships with aircraft like this. The idea of trying to land vertically on the pitching deck of a Destroyer while looking over your shoulder sounds ludicrous.
Then there’s the question of what a subsonic, turboprop fighter was actually supposed to do once it got airborne. They would have been slow, short-ranged and carried little armament.
Not a true “tail sitter”, the Ryan X-13 Vertijet could be launched and recovered from a special tilting trailer. It landed by hooking a horizontal cable at the top of the trailer. The idea worked surprisingly well. The project was cancelled when the Air Force decided they just didn’t need such a thing.
With today’s electronics you could actually build a workable “tail sitter”. One drone manufacturer is actively working on it.
The French attempted to produce a VTOL fighter capable of Mach 2 speeds. They came close with the Mirage IIIV. It used eight small jet engines to provide vertical lift. While the idea worked, it was totally impractical. The lift engines were just dead weight for the rest of the flight and took up a lot of room in an already small aircraft. If you’ve ever sat in a Mirage (I have), it’s an F-16 sized fighter. An operational Mirage IIIV would have been severely limited in range and payload.
The problem with any VTOL aircraft is it’s a compromise. All the “stuff” that allows it to take off and land vertically, be it lift-jets, fans, nozzles or whatever has to be carried around as dead weight the rest of the time.
The AV-8 Harrier works well for what it does, but has its limits. Notable victories in the Falklands War were more likely due to superior British tactics and missiles (AIM-9L) than the Harrier being a superior aircraft.
To date the only aircraft to take off vertically and go supersonic on the same flight is the much maligned F-35C.
The SNECMA Coléoptère looked like a big fan with a cockpit stuck on top. The circular duct surrounding the engine was an “annular wing”. Somehow that “wing” was able to produce lift in horizontal flight but I’m not sure of the aerodynamics. During testing it managed to take off and land vertically but, as you might imagine, tended to roll around its vertical axis. It briefly achieved horizontal flight, accidentally, on its ninth and last flight. That was right about the time the pilot ejected.
With further development it might actually have worked. In practice it would have had laughably short range and payload.
Another possible solution to the problem of vulnerable airfields was Zero Length Launch. The idea was simple enough, strap a rocket booster onto an F-100 (or MiG-19) and launch it off the back of a truck. Looks like fun.
Of course you still need a runway to land on so this only solved half the problem. Strap the same booster onto your car and you have an urban legend. Both the US and Soviets successfully tested this but nobody ever deployed it.
Another one from the “so weird only the French could have built it” file were the Leduc 010 through 022. This was actually a pre-war design that was carefully hid from the Germans and then tested after the war. The idea was to build a supersonic jet fighter using ramjet power.
A ramjet is a pretty simple stovepipe of an engine. There are no moving parts. Air goes in the front, fuel gets squirted in and burned, thrust comes out the back. The only problem is, they won’t run unless they’re already moving.
The Leduc 010 through 021 prototypes had to be carried aloft by another aircraft. The swept-wing Leduc 022 used its own turbojet to get it airborne.
Even with swept wings the Leduc 022 could never break the speed of sound. One look at that fat, barrel-shaped fuselage should tell you why.
The somewhat more conventional looking Nord Griffon actually did go Mach 2+ using a combination turbojet/ramjet powerplant. By that time, however, Dassault had already developed the excellent Mirage III. The Mirage III offered roughly the same performance in a simpler and cheaper package.
Not to be outdone, the British produced their share of oddities during this period. One was the Gloster Meteor “prone pilot” concept. Having the pilot lay on his belly, it was thought, would better allow him to withstand the G forces of maneuvering flight.
A special version of the Meteor fighter was built, with a second cockpit way out in front. The idea actually worked, but it had a couple flaws. The biggest one being that the pilot couldn’t really “check six”. As any fighter pilot will tell you, looking behind you is very important. There was also no way to incorporate an ejection seat into this setup. There’s a difference between “possible” and “practical”.
Today the F-16 partially incorporates this by inclining the pilot’s seat 30 degrees back to improve G tolerance.
Not to left out of the fun, the US Army decided that a “flying jeep” would be a good idea. This produced some pretty interesting looking prototypes.
The Hiller 1031-A-1 was essentially a “flying platform”. The operator stood on top of a big fan and steered it by shifting his weight around. It looks like it would have a high center of gravity but reportedly it flew fairly well. Top speed was a blistering 16 mph. While it looks like a lot of fun, going into combat at 16 mph while standing straight up doesn’t seem like a winner.
Even stranger was the de Lackner HZ-1 Aerocycle. The idea was to build a “personal helicopter” that someone could learn to fly with as little as 5 minutes of instruction. I mean really, what could possibly go wrong? If I know one thing about helicopters it’s that they’re exceedingly hard to fly.
The Aerocycle actually worked to a point. It could reach 5000 feet and 75 mph. It was also much harder to fly than envisioned. After a couple of crashes the idea was scrapped.
Strangest of all was the VZ-9 Avrocar. Avro Canada originally envisioned this “flying saucer” as a high speed fighter aircraft. When it became obvious that wasn’t going to work, the US Army thought it might fit their “flying jeep” requirement. The Avrocar used three jet engines to spin a large fan in the middle.
I don’t even understand exactly how it was steered, but it involved various devices that let more air come out one side than the other. That’s my highly technical explanation. Whatever it was, it didn’t work very well.
The VZ-9 flew, barely. In testing it never exceeded 35 mph and never went higher than 3 feet. It was inherently unstable and dangerous to fly. One test pilot described flying the VZ-9 as “balancing on a beach ball”. The idea was scrapped.
My favorite is the Williams X-Jet. Sometimes called the Williams Aerial Systems Platform (WASP) or just the “flying pulpit”. In case you ever wondered if it would be fun to just grab onto a jet engine and go for a ride. The X-Jet could reach 60 mph, move in any direction and stay airborne for up to 45 minutes. Still not as good as a helicopter and it didn’t look like it could carry much. I do desperately want one however.
One thing I’d like to point out concerning most of these “personal lift devices”.
There is likely to be a literal “dead zone” in its operating envelope. At some point you will be too high up to survive a fall but too low to use a parachute, assuming you had one.
Let’s suppose you’re cruising along on your X-Jet at say 50 feet and the engine quits. I guess it’s just not your day.
Chrysler’s VZ-6 flipped over and crashed on its first flight. ‘nuff said.
The Curtiss-Wright VZ-7 was an early “quadcopter”. It was controlled by changing the thrust of the four propellers. Today a lot of small drones use this exact configuration so it was arguably ahead of its time. It was reportedly easy to fly but top speed was a mere 32 mph. Slower than a, you know, jeep. The Army wasn’t interested.
The best of the flying jeep designs proved to be the Piasecki VZ-8 Airgeep. Using a pair of ducted fans, front and back, it flew fairly well. Top speed was 75 mph and it could reach 3000 feet. This was far less capable than the Army’s standard helicopter of the day, the UH-1 “Huey”. The Army rightly concluded that it was silly to build something that’s almost as hard to fly as a helicopter but slower.
Another of those “seemed like a good idea at the time” things was Davy Crockett.
Our defense strategy from the late 1940s through the 1950s can best be summed up as “we’ve got the bomb so that other stuff doesn’t really matter”. Presumably this weapon was meant to be used as a last-ditch defense by troops about to be overrun.
Davy Crockett was a very small nuclear warhead about the size of a watermelon. Launched from a recoilless rifle (similar to a WWII bazooka) this little guy had a range of a mile or two depending on which launcher it used. It had a very small yield of 20 tons of TNT but produced an awful lot of radiation. Anybody within 500 feet of the blast would be dead in minutes. Those at 1000 feet would die in a matter of days.
Note that the minimum range of the weapon was 1,200 feet. You’d better be wearing your lead underwear.
I suspect the Davy Crockett was the inspiration for the “mini nuke” in the Fallout games.
As long as we’re putting nukes on everything, why not an artillery piece? Yep, that’s exactly what they did.
The M65 Atomic Cannon or “Atomic Annie” could lob a 15 kiloton warhead roughly 20 miles. What impresses me the most is that they were able to build a nuclear weapon that could actually survive the force of being fired out of a cannon and still work.
I actually learn a lot from researching these stories. I always thought “Oh that’s just silly. They were never crazy enough to actually deploy something like this!” Turns out we built 20 of them and they were deployed in Europe and Korea for ten years. They weren’t the most mobile artillery pieces ever built which limited their usefulness to static defense.
But wait! There’s more! (As the late-night commercials used to say)
You also get nuclear shells for your standard 203mm and 155mm artillery!
Yes folks, we had several thousand nuclear artillery shells in the inventory until 1992. File that under “things even I didn’t know”. Yep, your average 8-inch howitzer unit could fire a weapon with roughly half the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
This should indicate just how dangerous the Cold War really was. Imagine the Red Army had come pouring through the Fulda Gap into West Germany. US Army units are in danger of being overrun or encircled. You just know they’re going to want to start using these things. And once you start using tactical nukes - it’s a pretty short jump from there to Armageddon.
Military planning in the 1950s was all about nukes and everybody wanted in on the game. Fearful of losing funding to the Air Force, the US Navy proposed a fleet of jet powered seaplanes.
Martin aircraft produced the P6M SeaMaster. Four powerful J75 engines gave the SeaMaster impressive performance. It came very close to becoming operational when the program was cancelled due to budget cuts.
Ultimately ballistic missile submarines gave the Navy its seat at the nuclear table.
Can’t have bombers without fighters to go with them. Enter the Convair Sea Dart. At the time the Sea Dart was envisioned, the Navy was worried that supersonic jets would be unsuitable for aircraft carriers.
The Sea Dart actually worked and even went supersonic. To date the only seaplane ever to break the sound barrier. As frequently happens though, before the Sea Dart had gone past the test phase its reason for existence was no more. The problems of operating supersonic jets from aircraft carriers had been solved so there was no need for a seaplane fighter.
From the “So weird only the Soviets could have built it” department comes the Lun-class ekranoplan.
What’s an “ekranoplan” you ask? Easier to say what it isn’t. It’s not quite a boat and it’s not really an airplane but it’s a little of both.
Sometimes called a wing-in-ground-effect vehicle or a “sea skimmer” that’s about what it does. It flies, but only a few feet off the water. This makes it much faster than a boat and more efficient than an aircraft.
Roughly the length of a 747, the Lun-class carried six P-270 (SS-N-22 Sunburn) anti-ship missiles as well as four 23mm cannons. It had a top speed of 340 mph and cruised at 280 mph, roughly ten to fifteen feet off the water.
They built exactly one of these things and it served with the Black Sea Fleet from 1987 until sometime in the 1990s. Sources are sketchy. They even tested a larger version, designated KM, which NATO dubbed the “Caspian Sea Monster”. It crashed in 1980 on a test flight, or float, or whatever it did.
If you want a closer look at the ekranoplan this site has some nice shots of the interior. It’s really a unique piece of technology.
The one that should really make you scratch your head and go “Just what the hell were they thinking?” is Project Pluto. If an 88-foot-long nuclear powered cruise missile flying at Mach 3 a thousand feet off the ground isn’t enough to give you nightmares I don’t know what is.
Yeah, you heard me, nuclear powered cruise missile. The nuclear ramjet was elegant in its simplicity. Air goes in the front, gets heated to a gazillion degrees by a freakin’ unshielded nuclear reactor and expands out the back with something like 35,000 pounds of thrust — forever. Well, not really forever but for a very long time.
The SLAM or Supersonic Low Altitude Missile, as it was called, would be able to orbit for weeks over (hopefully) the ocean until signaled to attack its targets. It would then drop down to low altitude and dash at Mach 3 across the Soviet Union, dropping nukes as it went.
Heck, just the shock wave from going Mach 3 at 1000 feet would have probably knocked down buildings. Not to mention the radioactive exhaust spewing out the back end. After laying waste to half a continent the SLAM was then supposed to ditch itself in the ocean, which at that point was probably the least of our worries.
As crazy as it sounds, the thing might actually have worked. The reactor was successfully tested and the missile theoretically would have been sturdy enough to take the stress of flying Mach 3 at low level.
Fortunately saner heads prevailed and the project was cancelled before this flying Chernobyl could be unleashed on the planet. Simply testing such a weapon was deemed too risky. Since one of the early Snark cruise missiles took a wrong turn and ended up in Brazil, I’d say that was a good call.