Tailsitter

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The Convair Pogo was one tailsitter design.

A tailsitter is a type of VTOL aircraft that launches and lands on its tail, something akin to a Buck Rogers type rocket, such as the McDonnell Douglas DC-X Delta Clipper. One of the most famous examples of this type of aircraft is the Ryan X-13 Vertijet. Among the propeller-driven versions were the Lockheed XFV, and the Convair XFY Pogo. Studies and wind tunnel models were made of a tail-sitting version of the F-16 that would be ship based. It had a hinged nose section.

The Luftwaffe had a tailsitter project as well, the Focke-Wulf Triebflügeljäger (wing-driven fighter). This project was peculiar insofar as the wings were mounted diagonally on a rotating section of the fuselage and driven by small jet engines on the wingtips. The aircraft was supposed to be propelled by this wing rotation. In fact, it was more akin to a helicopter, generating lift by rotating winglets or blades, than to an airplane, which generates lift from the forward speed pushing air over the planes of the wing. It could not make conventional landings, and the entire body of the aircraft shifted from a vertical to a horizontal orientation and back again for standard flight.

The downfall of the tailsitter configuration was the lack of ability to transition the pilot to a comfortable position from which to control his descent. This inability led to the concept being abandoned as soon as the experiments that led to the development of the Hawker Siddeley Harrier in the 1960s began to bear fruit.