Word: vtol
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...long-term dream of airplane designers, the jet-powered vertical take-off plane, became an official reality last week. The Air Force announced that Ryan Aeronautical Co. has test-flown successfully its jet X-13 VTOL (vertical take-off and landing), putting it through all its paces after 18 months of partial tests...
...favorite dream of airplane designers is a VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) that will leap into the air like a helicopter, fly as fast as a jet interceptor, and land vertically. Helicopters cannot be upgraded to do this job: they are inherently too slow. The Navy's "Pogo" (Convair XFY-I) takes off and lands vertically, but it has propellers and therefore can never fly as fast as a jet. Many other types have been tried (movable wings, swiveled engines, folding rotors), but none of them show promise of matching the designers' dream...
Rising Ratio. The ideal VTOL may come into being through the continuous improvement of jet engines. Research Engineer Earl R. Hinz of Ryan Aeronautical Co. points out that when the static thrust of an airplane's engines exceeds the airplane's weight, a vertical take-off is possible-at least in theory. Apparently no operational jet plane has such thrust at present, but the ratio of thrust to weight-even with the low-power figures still published by the security-morbid U.S. Department of Defense-is climbing rapidly. For the F-86 Sabre jet the ratio is four...
...Secret VTOL. Nothing has been released about Ryan's X-13 "Vertijet" which is still a highly classified project. But the technical public got a quick look at it when it was shipped to Edwards, carefully wrapped (see cut). Airplane-industry gossip has been swapping bits of information about it ever since...
Along the expanding sector in aircraft design known as VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing), several U.S. companies have tried to meet military and civilian demands for a plane that can rise straight up, like a helicopter, then fly horizontally with the speed of conventional aircraft. Last week the first successful conversion in flight from helicopter to conventional aircraft was announced by the Defense Department. The pioneering hybrid: McDonnell Aircraft Corp.'s experimental XV1 convertiplane* (TIME, Feb. 15, 1954), designed for the Army and Air Force...