What a magnificent and thrilling sight this great paper and varnished taffeta hot-air balloon must have made as it rose 3,000 feet above cheering spectators. The blue-and-gold balloon was seventy-five feet high and adorned with images of fleur-de-lis, signs of the zodiac and suns emblazoned with the face of King Louis XVI. The crew, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, a chemistry and physics teacher, and the Marquis d’Arlandes, an Army officer, flew the best part of six miles in twenty-five minutes and brought their craft down to land safely.
The sheer exoticism of its decoration, and the magic nature of its flight, must surely have set Parisian minds racing back through childhood stories of fairies, dragons and flying carpets. Antoine Galland’s French translation of The Arabian Nights, published between 1704 and 1717, had been a huge success; by the time of Pilâtre de Rozier and d’Arlandes’ flight, many Parisians would have been familiar with tales of magic carpets, of how Prince Husain, the eldest son of the sultan of India, bought such a carpet in Bisnagar that could rise in an instant – vertical take-off, of course – and transport him, in ‘the twinkle of an eye’, to places ‘many a day’s journey and difficult to reach’. Stories of flying carpets go back even further than these tales, a thousand years old or more. King Solomon was said to have flown on a green-and-gold silk carpet measuring sixty miles square; it could carry 40,000 passengers, or a hundred times more than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. Even today, Iranians tell wondrous stories of magic carpets used, at least in one case, for warfare. In 1213, or so the story goes, Prince Berhoz of Khorasan in eastern Persia married a young Jewess, Ashirah, whose father wove magic carpets. Berhoz commissioned from his father-in-law two dozen flying carpets supported on bamboo frames. Two soldiers were assigned to each carpet, which was equipped with bows and poison-tipped arrows and fireballs, and when Berhoz’s father launched a war against the neighbouring shah of Khwarzem, this mythical thirteenth-century fighter-bomber squadron made a successful attack on the shah’s castle, setting it ablaze. It was not so very different from a Harrier operation in Iraq or Afghanistan some eight hundred years later.
In India, meanwhile, many stories are still spun, often with impassioned seriousness by fervent Hindu nationalists, concerning ‘vimanas’, or highly advanced rocket-powered aircraft that were flown across the subcontinent very many thousands of years ago by the enlightened high priest-kings of the Rama empire. The ‘ancient’ manuscript relating to flying machines, however, seems to have been dictated by the mystic Pandit Subbaraya Shastry (1866–1940) some time after the end of the First World War. A Hindi translation published in 1959 included diagrams of complex jet engines, although these were the work of T. K. Ellappa, a draughtsman at an engineering college in Bangalore.
Flying chariots are, of course, staples of tales told in India’s national epic, the Mahabharata, dating from much the same time as the Bible. One such spherical vimana was apparently able to fly up, down, backwards and forwards. In the Sanskrit Samarangana Sutradhara, a wide-ranging treatise on classical Indian architecture written in the eleventh century by Paramara, king of Bhoja of Dhar, we learn that a vimana must be:
Strong and durable… like a great flying bird of light material. Inside one must put the mercury engine with its iron-heating apparatus underneath. By means of the power latent in the mercury, which sets the driving whirlwind in action, a man sitting inside may travel a great distance in the sky. The movements of the Vimana are such that it can vertically ascend, vertically descend, move slanting forwards and backwards. With the help of the machines, human beings can fly in the air and heavenly beings come down to earth.
Quite clearly, the design team at Hawker Siddeley, the best part of a thousand years later, had been extraordinarily slow on the uptake.
British observers, meanwhile, appear to have missed the flight of a latter-day vimana, allegedly constructed by Shivkar Bapuji Talpade (1864–1916), a Sanskrit scholar, his wife and an architect friend, and flown successfully to a height of 1,500 feet over Chowpatty Beach, Bombay (now Mumbai), in 1895. It landed automatically. The Marutsakha, or ‘Friend of the Winds’, was powered by a ‘mercury ion engine’, but sadly, said Talpade, a paucity of personal funds, a lack of sponsorship and imperial animosity ensured that this sensational performance was a oneoff. After his death in 1916, his relatives are said to have sold the machine to Rally Brothers, a firm of British exporters based in Bombay. Presumably the brothers Rally assumed that the British government would have no interest in the world’s first successful heavier-than-air flying machine, or perhaps they were simply too dull to make sense of its highly advanced Vedic jet technology.
However fanciful, stories like these drawn from across at least two-and-a-half thousand years continued to haunt the imaginations not just of poets, novelists and artists, but of inventors and pioneer aviators, too. Even so, the first reliable VTOL aircraft were the rigid airships – an advanced form of hot-air balloon – that took to the air at the beginning of the twentieth century. The very first was Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s Luftschiff Zeppelin 1; it made its maiden flight, over Lake Constance, on 2 July 1900. During the First World War, the Zeppelins became the first successful long-range bombers. On 13 October 1915, L.15 bombed central London, damaging the Lyceum Theatre at Charing Cross, killing seventeen people and injuring twenty more.
The aim, post-war, sought by the Germans, the British and the Americans was to nurture enormous dirigibles or rigid airships that could fly across continents and oceans, and take off, land and moor in city centres. Rather fancifully, it was assumed that mighty airships would tie up at the top of the Empire State Building. The idea of using airships as airliners and bombers was abandoned after a number of spectacular accidents – in particular, the loss of the British government-sponsored R101 over France on 5 October 1930, and the fire, caught on newsreel, that destroyed LZ 129 Hindenburg as it attempted to dock at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey on 6 May 1937. Still, these impressive, if flawed, machines highlighted some of the advantages of what might be achieved by aircraft that could take off and land vertically, and that could hover, whether benignly or menacingly, over ‘targets’ and city centres – which, as the Zeppelin raids over London proved, had become one and the same thing.
It was the Germans who took the next successful step in the story of vertical flight with the maiden flight of the world’s first practical helicopter on 26 June 1936. This was the Focke-Wulf Fw 61, designed by Heinrich Focke and Gerd Achgelis. It was an instant success, and a step forwards from the autogyro, a small aircraft invented by the Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva and first flown on 9 January 1923. The helicopter blades of the autogyro were not driven by or connected to the aircraft’s engine, but, rotating in flight, they allowed the pilot to fly very slowly, something that fixed-wing aircraft were unable to do without stalling. The arrival of the Fw 61 meant that pilots were now able to take off and land vertically, to fly just above the ground if necessary at low speed and, of course, to hover. This ability to stay still a few inches above the ground was, although it sounds odd to say so, a giant leap for aviation.
What neither the airship nor the helicopter could do, though, is what aircraft like the Sopwith Camel and Fokker D.VII had been doing in the late stages of the First World War: flying fast and aerobatically. These, in modern parlance, were ‘air superiority’ fighters and their latest equivalents, the Supermarine Spitfire and Messerschmitt Bf 109, were both making their maiden flights in the mid-1930s. But despite the undoubted success, and omnipresence, of the piston-engined fighter and bomber in the Second World War, the next challenge for military aircraft design – a step aside from the helicopter, an aircraft that was to succeed brilliantly in its own right, and from the burgeoning dream of supersonic flight – was surely a fighter that could take off, land and hover like the Fw 61, and shoot off at great speed and with great dexterity to engage the enemy. If such an aircraft proved feasible, it would also mean that air forces would be able to fly it from the most basic forward air ba
ses; there would no longer be a need for long grass strips or concrete runways. The potential was enormous. But how to get there?
There were several routes that, one way or another, led to the Hawker P.1127 prototype and so to the Hawker Siddeley Harrier. Equally, the development of pilotless aircraft, or drones – which might yet altogether replace manned fighter aircraft, however ingenious these can be, in years to come – evolved at much the same time. In 1941, Robert Lusser (1889–1969), a German aircraft engineer, moved from Heinkel, where he had been working on a rival to the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, to Fieseler. Here he played a key role, with Fritz Gosslau of the engine manufacturer Argus, in the design and development of the Fieseler Fi 103, dubbed the V1 flying bomb (V standing for Vergeltungswaffe, or revenge weapon) by the Nazis. Wernher von Braun, meanwhile, was at work on the V2, a vertical take-off rocket and worryingly effective long-range ballistic missile against which there was then no defence. Both V1 and V2 were produced too late in the day to radically affect the outcome of the Second World War. However, Lusser and von Braun teamed up after the war, working at Huntsville, Alabama in the United States on the rocketry projects that would see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the Moon less than a quarter of a century after VE-Day.
The importance of these weapons – one leading to the ‘drones’ employed frequently by the US military in recent years, the other to NASA’s successful manned space rockets – had much to do with the urgency that had driven their development. With Germany under aerial assault night and day by British and US bombers, escorted later in the war by powerful and well-armed long-range fighters, scientists and engineers were propelled into thinking quickly and creatively. What was the type of aircraft, or drone or rocket, best able to defend Germany from Allied bombers?
One answer, which led to a cornucopia of imaginative ideas, was for aircraft that could be deployed from makeshift airfields established along the bombers’ anticipated flight paths. These machines needed to be cheap and quick to build, easy to transport, and yet capable of climbing rapidly and hitting the enemy’s bombers hard. Here truly, as the Allies approached the German border from the west and the Russians from the east, were desperate measures for desperate times. The sheer ingenuity of many of the designs called for by the Luftwaffe’s Emergency Fighter Programme of spring 1944 – which featured various forms of high-speed jets, some with swept wings, others with delta wings and vertical take-off aircraft too – was extraordinary. A number of books have been published in recent years on these ‘secret’ Nazi aircraft designs. While some were little more than sketches on scraps of paper, others were not only promising but were even taken up after the war by the Allies, especially in the United States and the Soviet Union.
One of the most promising was the Bachem Ba 349 Natter (Viper), a small vertical take-off rocket-powered interceptor designed by Erich Bachem, a Fieseler engineer, and produced under the auspices of Heinrich Himmler’s SS at a purpose-built workshop at Waldsee in the Black Forest. The idea for such an aircraft had, in fact, been proposed by Wernher von Braun in 1939, and although enthusiastically received by Field Marshal Ernst Milch, the partly Jewish Air Inspector General who had done much to create the new Luftwaffe that went to war that same year, it was rejected by the Reich Air Ministry, which believed it to be both unnecessary and unworkable.
Designed to be constructed using semi-skilled labour, the Natter was essentially a wooden aircraft powered by the Walter 109-509A rocket motor. This produced 3,740 lbs of thrust boosted by a further 4,400 lbs generated by four Schmidding 109-533 solid-fuel rockets bolted in pairs to either side of the fuselage. Launched from a steel guide tower, the Natter should have climbed vertically at the astonishing rate of 37,400 feet a minute, reaching a top speed of 621 mph; as Allied bombers rarely flew much above 20,000 feet, the rocket plane, armed to the teeth with a formidable cluster of Henschel unguided rockets in its nose cone, might well have spelt sudden death for many unsuspecting bomber crews. Once the rockets had been released, the Natter’s pilot would escape and parachute back to safety and the next mission, while the expended fuselage would, ideally, strike another enemy bomber and destroy it.
Progress on this secret machine was rapid. On 3 November 1944, a prototype, piloted by Erich Klockner, was carried, it seems, up to 18,000 feet by a Heinkel He 111 bomber, and then released. It flew surprisingly well and landed safely. In late February 1945, a successful vertical rocket launch was made with a dummy pilot. On 1 March, a Natter lifted off with Oberleutnant Lothar Siebert aboard. The launch was radio-controlled; the pilot was to take control as the machine descended towards enemy bomber formations. At about 1,600 feet, however, the aircraft inverted and, flying at fifteen degrees to the vertical, vanished into the clouds; it reappeared and within thirty seconds smashed into the ground, killing Siebert. The war, of course, was all but over at this point, and although the Germans are said to have had ten further Natters ready on launchers at Kirchheim, near Stuttgart, these saw no action – despite Squadron Leader Paddy Payne, Warrior of the Skies, nobly attacking a fully functioning, bright-red Natter with his late-model Spitfire in the pages of the Lion comic I pored over as a young boy in the 1960s. One of the surviving Natters was shipped to the United States for inspection; today, it rests, unrestored, in a warehouse belonging to the Smithsonian.
There were several other intriguing designs on the drawing boards of German aircraft manufacturers as late as the end of March 1945, some of which seem even more futuristic, and might have been more successful, given time, than the Bachem Ba 349, of which a total of thirty-six appear to have been built. Focke-Wulf offered the Triebflügeljäger, or Thrust-Wing Fighter, an astonishing wingless VTOL interceptor. Sitting on its tail with its nose cone pointing skywards, the Triebflügel was to have been powered by ramjets located on the tips of the three blades of a giant propeller designed to spin around the centre of the fuselage. The aircraft would have taken off vertically, rather like a helicopter, and then levelled out with the jet-powered blades acting like a giant airscrew and propelling the fighter forwards at what Focke-Wulf engineers calculated would be a top speed of 621 mph. It looked like a machine Dan Dare’s mortal enemies, the Treens, might fly on short missions across Venus in the pages of the Eagle, the British boy’s comic launched in 1950 that celebrated the kind of technological progress that led to the Harrier and men on the Moon. It was not until 1955 that the Americans released information on this top-secret VTOL jet.
Meanwhile, Heinkel proposed the Lerche (Lark), a VTOL fighter and ground-attack aircraft that was also to have stood on its tail at take-off. Eschewing jet or rocket propulsion, the Lerche was to have been powered by a pair of 2,000 hp Daimler-Benz 605D V12s, the ultimate development of the engine produced in tens of thousands and fitted to the Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter. These were to have driven two large contrarotating propellers set within an ‘annular’ wing – a metal ring encompassing the centre of the fuselage – and, theoretically, would have given the Lerche a top speed of 497 mph and a ceiling of 46,910 feet. This remarkable aircraft might well have flown successfully. Its appearance, at the bitter end of the battle for Germany, would certainly have been a shock to Allied aircrew. It would have seemed wingless, an aircraft, or spaceship, from the pages of a science-fiction fantasy, a machine inhabiting a parallel universe to that of Spitfires, Mustangs, Thunderbolts and Flying Fortresses. Even today, the Lerche retains something of the look of a flying machine that might have been dreamed up by NASA scientists and engineers twenty years later – and NASA was, of course, well staffed with brilliant young ex-Nazi engineers and scientists.
Heinkel drew up a further design, very similar to the Lerche, for a turboprop version designated Wespe (Wasp). Although the first turboprop plane to fly was a specially adapted British Gloster Meteor in September 1945, the idea had been proposed and tested, although neither in flight nor with a full-scale aircraft, by György Jendrassik, a Hungarian mechanical engineer, in the late 1920s. German industry had
access to this research, and during the Second World War various companies – BMW, Hirth and Daimler-Benz among them – invested in turboprop development. But as the fruits of their experiments were not expected to be seen until sometime late in 1945, and probably later, the Wespe was never going to be built, still less flown in action. While it was fortunate that Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich missed its target by 988 years, the pace of research and development in the German aero-industry in the last two or three years of the war was unprecedented and remains unsurpassed.
The memory, and perhaps the blueprints, of such aircraft lived on well into the following decade. In 1959, SNECMA, the French engine company, unveiled its sensational C.450-01 Coléoptère. A test bed for its latest, experimental pulse-jet engine, the Atar 101 E.5V, this tail-sitting jet featured an annular wing and was very much the jet descendant, or younger sibling, of the Lerche and Wespe. Promising great things, it did actually take off, on 6 May 1959, but crashed two months later while attempting the transition from vertical to forward flight; the pilot ejected safely, although the aircraft was written off.
If the Coléoptère was to be a product of prolonged post-war experimentation with new forms of military aircraft, the wartime VTOL machines proposed, or tested, by the Germans were the products of an ever-increasing urgency. For pilots, they were, or would have been, uncomfortable machines to operate. Even if the Lerche and Wespe could have been built in time to take on the aerial armadas of four-engined Allied aircraft carpet-bombing German towns and cities in 1945, pilot error would surely have led to any number of accidents. Lying prone in a cockpit staring up at the sky was never going to be an easy way for a pilot to take off, while having to land an aircraft vertically on its tail after an adrenaline-sapping mission was asking a lot of even the coolest and most competent airman. In any case, such landings would have made these aircraft easy prey for marauding and highly potent Allied fighters, which were by now capable of flying at very nearly 500 mph and diving close to the speed of sound and were armed with batteries of cannons and large-calibre machine guns.
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