Vertical Takeoff and Landing Aircraft

While the idea of a vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft sounds interesting to just about everyone, few people are acquainted with the long and interesting history of the diverse designs that attempt to achieve this. A large fraction of the population of the western world has first-hand experience being flown inside conventional (non-VTOL) airplanes, but few have ever been inside a helicopter. And while airplanes dominate the aviation world, helicopters only fill small often-unseen niches, and VTOL airplanes and other VTOL machines are even less visible.

Many people today realize that VTOL airplanes exist only because they have seen True Lies (an action movie with a terrific Harrier scene) or heard of the troubles with the V-22 program. Many of the people who are aware of the JSF program (probably because of its escalating costs) do not realize it is a VTOL airplane (although this is probably changing since Die Hard 4 came out). Most people do not at all realize that this kind of airplane exists. And even those who are familiar with the designs of the Harrier, JSF, and/or V-22 do not realize that these airplanes are only the tip of an iceberg spanning half a century of extremely unusual, clever, interesting, unique, but ultimately unpopular airplane designs.

So VTOL technology has had extremely little impact in the world of aviation. VTOL aircraft (including helicopters) are extremely inefficient and heavy, having smaller payloads and greater fuel needs than regular airplanes. Despite this, the several varieties of VTOL technologies are so interesting, in my opinion, that I want to write a little text about them. I guarantee that, in reading it, you will learn about some amazingly clever designs, and about aircraft that do thin...

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...ngly cool and very easy to fly, these are extremely expensive, terribly wasteful, surprisingly loud, and only have a range of 20 seconds to 5 minutes, not really long enough to get anywhere or even to really have much fun.

So now that you have a basic idea of the different kinds of VTOL aircraft (tail-sitters, tilt-engines, thrust-vectoring, bucket flaps, ducted fans, lift-engines, airplane-helicopter hybrids, and personal platforms), let’s talk about them. Yes, all of them. Well, all the ones that have ever actually flown, anyways. I won’t spend too much time on each one (especially as some have very little information on them available unless you’re willing to travel to the research group that made them and flew them, if it still exists), but I want to give you an idea of how many of these there have been, of how diverse they are, and of how they’re just so cool.