‘The airplane won’t amount to a damn thing until they get a machine that will action like a hummingbird: go straight up, go forward, go backward, come straight down and alight like a hummingbird. It isn’t easy; [but] somebody is going to do it, said Thomas Edison, the great American inventor. But it would be many years before somebody fulfilled his prophecy.

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Meanwhile, conventional fixed-wing aircraft have proven themselves admirably, lifting tons of personnel and equipment from gravity’s embrace, flying around the globe nonstop or traveling faster than the speed of sound.

Helicopters, on the other had, can do three things conventional airplanes cannot: take off vertically, land vertically and hover. However, the same machine cannot match the high forward speed or maximum altitudes capable of an airplane. Therefore, there has historically been a major gap between fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters in both the civilian and military aeronautical world. The need for an aircraft that could not only take off vertically from any point large enough to allow adequate space for the machine itself, but also achieve speeds fast enough to make it viable in the fixed-wing world became apparent to military planners shortly after World War II with the advent of the jet engine. The turbojet engine pushed known aeronautical knowledge to the limits. For the first time since the Wright brothers lifted off in the Wright Flyer at Kill Devil Hill, airplanes had reached the point where they required great lengths of hard smooth-surfaced runway to both take off and land. And for naval aviation, stream-driven catapults were required in addition to the carriers’ forward speed to provide sufficient speed to launch aircraft. The gap between helicopters and airplanes widened significantly.

To fill this gap, engineers attacked the problem of combining the advantages of the helicopter with those of the airplane: vertical takeoff and landing capabilities plus speed. For this, a completely new aircraft was required – a machine that utilized wings instead of rotor blades, and was powered by both vertical and aft thrust.

With these requirements in mind, Rolls Royce in 1953 created a machine it referred to as the Thrust Measurement Rig to test the principles of vertical flight utilizing the thrust provided by turbojet engines. It was an odd contraption fitted with two Rolls Royce turbojets mounted horizontally, with their jets vectored vertically downward to provide the thrust required to lift the device. Resembling a box construction of welded steel tubing, the machine, although it had no wings and could not achieve the speeds of an airplane, did provide a great deal of information concerning the capabilities of the turbine engine. The experiment of vectored jet thrust was successful and the machine, nicknamed the Flying Bedstead, completed more than 500 hovering flights to prove the viability of flying by thrust alone.

Then, in 1957, the French SNECMA design team successfully flew an Attouste jet-engine-powered oddity that resembled a futuristic rocket ship. With the vertically mounted engine being the main section of fuselage, supported by four fin-shaped supports of tubing, this unusual machine – strangely resembling a 1950s rocket to Mars – rose vertically and hovered to dangerous heights successfully on several occasions.

In America, the Doke VZ 40A, a more conventional design that resembled an airplane with a shrouded propeller mounted at each wing tip, hovered effortlessly and managed forward flight with a semblance of controllability. Yet, because of lack of financing, it faded into obscurity as another noble effort that died in development.

Meanwhile, the Chrysler Corporation, with its great number of government contacts and massive capability to finance experimentation, developed the Flying Jeep. This futuristic machine consisted of two shrouded fans connected by a short airframe upon which the pilot/driver was accommodated. The thrust of the fans could be directed through a system of controllable vanes. It hovered and moved about remarkably well, but the U.S. Army, although impressed, failed to adopt the vehicle into its inventory.

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