But the Air Force intervened
by JOSEPH TREVITHICK
When
one thinks of the U.S. Army, one generally doesn’t think of squadrons
of jets flying around the battlefield. But at the height of the Cold
War, the ground combat branch had its sights set on buying a fleet of
jump jets.
Though
the Pentagon turned the U.S. Air Force into a separate service shortly
after World War II, its ground-pounding cousins remained interested in
helicopters and other flying machines. A decade later, Army aviators
were hard at work with aircraft makers to cook up special craft that
could land and take off like helicopters, but fly like normal planes.
“While
the 1947 National Security Act created an independent United States Air
Force, this did not halt the expansion of Army organic aviation, or the
Army’s increasing use of the helicopter,” Dr. Ian Horwood wrote in Interservice Rivalry and Airpower in the Vietnam War.
“[But] in the early 1950s, such ‘convertiplanes’ appeared to offer more
potential for Army surveillance and air mobility tasks than
helicopters.”
In the end, the Air Force scuttled the plans — and buried decades of work.
By
1950, the idea of combining features from helicopters and traditional
aircraft was hardly new. Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva invented the
autogyro, which blends a free-spinning rotor and a conventional
forward- or rear-mounted engine, nearly three decades earlier.
As
world settled into the Cold War, major air arms became fascinated by
the idea a jump jet that wouldn’t necessarily need a long runway. During
World War II, Allied forces bombarded Nazi Germany’s air bases and
limited the Luftwaffe’s ability to fight back.
On
both sides of the Iron Curtain, military commanders realized that
nuclear war would only speed up the destruction of normal airstrips. By
the time Berlin fell, Hilter’s weaponeers had already started work on
various alternatives, such as rocket planes that could shoot straight up
into the sky from a small launch rail right into enemy bomber
formations
