VATOL F-18

In the 1970’s, there was a dubious flirtation with VTOL jet fighters for US Navy use. VTOL fighters would, theoreticaly, allow smaller ships to carry jet fighters, and could allow the cash-strapped Navy to weild decent air power without having to have a number of giant supercarriers. As it turned out, the whole idea fell flat.

But while it was ongoing, one proposed mode of VTOL operations was VATOL, for Vertical Attitude Take Off and Landing. In other words, tailsitters. Most of the designs were not tailsitters in the way that the Convair Pogo was… more in the way the Ryan X-13 was. They would not land tail-first on a  horizontal platform, but belly-first on a vertical platform. This way the platform could be hung over the side of the ship, permitting both easy rotation to horizontal for servicing while avoiding issues associated with a jet engine blasting directly onto a deck.

VATOL of course has the problem that the pilot can’t see where the hell he’s going while he’s laying on his back. So one idea was to tilt the entire cockpit forward by 90 degrees. Thus when the plane was in vertical position, the cockpit would still be in a comfortable horizontal position. No fighter jet had ever been built like that, so it was a concept needing some evaluation. NASA-Langley built subscale models of both the Northrop F-17 and F-16 with cockpits that would angle forward by about 90- degrees and flew them in vertical attitude. The tests showed that the idea was workable, but the weight penalty – and associated cost hits – helped make sure it never came to pass. The VATOL F-16 and F-18 were not true proposals; nobody seriously wanted VATOL versions of these craft. But they were convenient subjects for testing against known baselines. Photos below show a 1975 test.