Convair versus the aircraft carrier (part 2)

As I blogged recently, the US aircraft manufacturer Convair unsuccessfully attempted to consign the aircraft carrier to the history books with its experimental Sea Dart waterborne fighter.

The Sea Dart wasn't Convair's only attempt to do away with the Navy's floating airfields, though. Meet the Convair XFY (AKA the "Pogo"), a shiny turboprop that sat on its tail and rose vertically, like a rocket, with no need for an inconveniently big ocean-going runway.

The Pogo was also supposed to land vertically on its tail. To land the craft, the pilot had to look back behind himself to properly stabilize the craft, a mighty tall order on an airfield and practically impossible on the rolling, pitching deck of a sub-aircraft-carrier-sized vessel. This, combined with problems with getting into a hover after high speed flight, so the craft could make the perilous tail-first descent, killed the project.

End of story? Probably, although, maybe somebody might want to look at this idea again. The Pogo was a flop as a piloted vehicle with 1950's technology, but we're now in the 21st century, with highly capable drones beginning to supplant the military's crewed aircraft

Take away the pilot, add spoilers and air brakes to help the craft slow down and stop for the descent phase and you might have the makings of a usable craft. For an on-board computer linked to gyroscopes / rear-facing radar or lasers, the tail-first descent that would tax a human pilot to breaking point might be achievable. And with no human on board to be crushed by the g-forces, it could be launched by some form of rocket or catapult, so it wouldn't waste huge amounts of fuel in a vertical take-off.

Probably a daft idea, based on nothing more technical than watching too many episodes of Thunderbirds as a kid, but in a nation that's currently paying billions for aircraft carriers that won't be ready for years and won't have any planes to fly from them for even longer, the idea of replacing the Queen Elizabeth with VTOL drones launched from something much smaller and a few billion pounds cheaper sounds tempting. Mind you, I guess we've already paid for a substantial chunk of aircraft carrier, and given Britain's past record in defence procurement, we'd probably just end up with a fleet of drones that cost even more than an aircraft carrier, ten years later than promised.