Against the silver-gray sky of old film reels, the bulbous jet shot up like a saucer from an old Ray Harryhausen movie. The Short SC1, a British-built experimental aircraft, was the first fixed-wing aircraft built in the United Kingdom to demonstrate that it could fly without a runway. It belongs to that Formation of the Early Cold War where bare-metal jets stumble across concepts and practices that will later be bent into useful forms — including vertical takeoffs.
Vertical take-off and landing, or VTOL, is hard technology with obvious trade-offs. The fixed wings and forward thrust from the propellers — and especially from the jet — allow the aircraft to fly fast and over long distances. But such planes need a runway, sometimes a really long one, to operate stably. The helicopter’s propellers provide reliable vertical take-off and landing from a much smaller landing padbut pure propeller vehicles are limited by their design and fly much slower than airplanes in horizontal flight.
Finding VTOL in a reliable way took decades. Helicopters are widely used, as are many propeller-driven aircraft Unmanned aircraft, but other planes are more difficult to fine-tune. The V-22 Osprey transport aircraft is a tilt-rotor aircraft whose engines rotate perpendicular to the ground for take-off and landing before being placed horizontally to provide forward thrust in flight. This car took repeated years to make sure traveling on one is not an automatic one death penalty.
Instead of a rotary engine, when the Short SC1 was designed in the late 1950s, it relied on separate methods of propulsion, with four dedicated turbofans for vertical lift, as well as one turbofan for shifting. move forward. The SC1 is purely an experimental test: The lessons learned from it will continue to inform the two generations of jets entering service. At the time of its formation, it was also considered a transport precursors.
Both USA and UK are active today F-35B, a jet that replaced the Harrier VTOL jump jet, a British-made fighter aircraft born after the Short SC1. (Technically, the F-35B is a “short takeoff vertical landing” or STOVL jet, but it’s mostly suited to the same role.) The F-35B can still have trouble taking off. wings, such as the one that crashed on landing at Fort Worth last December. Lightly hovering requires the use of strong thrust against gravity and forward motion, but not too much.
Short SC1 was first revealed to the public on December 18, 1956. Under the title ““New British jet launches,” the Associated Press said, “Press lauds the plane – the SC1 – which has put Britain ahead of the US and Russia in the race to develop a jet that can operate from small airfields instead of long runways. miles. SC1 – SC stands for Strange Contraption – underwent its first rolling tests at a protected airport in Belfast yesterday.
The development of SC1 was done as part of the UK, and NATO, a broader effort to design VTOL vehicles. ONE 1960’s memo outlines the requirements for the VTOL vehicle: it must be able to fly low in all weather, take off and land from a field 500 feet long, and have trees or a 50-foot building at the end. The vehicle must be capable of carrying 12,000 pounds for 500 knots, must have a cruise speed of at least 230 mph, and be able to do all of that while being simple to maintain and quick to unload and reload.
These requirements will allow the Short SC1, or any subsequent aircraft built upon its success, to support small armed reconnaissance units, missile-equipped supply teams, and say allow troops to disperse while being resupplyed. That role is, in part, now taken by helicopters and V-22s, with the SC1’s key innovations paving the way for faster fighters.
By 1961, NATO was aiming to design a supersonic VTOL aircraft, a goal to be accomplished by eagle. Lighter materials, as well as a thrust vectoring approach from a single engine, give the aircraft a better fit.
Later VTOL aircraft also removed the stilt-like landing gear, which on the SC1 provided some protection from great thermal force downwards. This heat means that, while SC1 can take off and land vertically, it must do so on concrete or other materials that can absorb large streams of hot jet exhaust without catching fire or blown away, as can happen in grasslands.
Tragedy struck the SC1 on October 2, 1963, when one of the two aircraft built “experienced an error in the gyroscope input of the auto stabilizer. This sudden error caused the plane to become uncontrollable and it crashed from a height of about 40 feet (12.2 m), killing many people. [Royal Aircraft Establishment] test pilot Richard Green when it flipped over on impact,” wrote Tony the butlerin a masterful deep dive on SC1.
The crashed plane was restored to service and the last flight of the SC1 for research and testing took place in May 1973. Today, both aircraft are museum artifacts.
Like much of the jet’s early days, the SC1 is intriguing as an example of a direction not taken, its massive array of engines offering an answer to a problem that ultimately there was a much more elegant solution.
In flight, as this 1960 film shows, the SC1 is not pleasantly elegant. Smooth vertical movement, slightly discrete horizontal flight. Its three landing gears, high on poles, looked like remnants from a child’s drawing of an airplane. See it below:
