What accounts for our endless fascination with vertical takeoff and landing? If you're of a certain age and followed aerospace developments in the late 1950s and 1960s, you witnessed an endless procession of VTOL projects that seemed to signal a new era of vertical flight. But of the many designs proposed during that imaginative era, most of which never made it off the drafting table, only one VTOL airplane still flies: the Harrier Jump Jet (stories, P. 16 and 20). The reasons are many but basically boil down to the fact that it requires a lot of power for a heavy, conventional-wing airplane to take off and land vertically. Helicopters solve this problem by using a rotating wing for lift, but that rotor also limits the aircraft's speed due to the physics involved. Since those early heady days of pioneering VTOL work, the ideal aircraft, particularly for the military-one that can take off vertically, carry a significant load, attain supersonic speeds and land on a dime-has remained elusive. Only the recently introduced Lockheed Martin F-35B comes close to attaining that ideal, and its drawbacks and growing pains have been well documented.
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