When it comes to aviation curiosities, few machines captivate the imagination like the Fairey Rotodyne. This British hybrid aircraft was a daring attempt to combine helicopter and fixed-wing efficiency into a single vehicle. A bold experiment in aeronautical design, the Rotodyne promised vertical takeoffs and landings in cramped urban spaces while offering the speed and range of a regional airliner. First flown in 1957, it captured the world’s attention but ultimately failed to realize its potential. Despite featured before, new footage keeps fascinating us. If you have never heard about this jet, keep reading.
The Rotodyne’s innovative design centered around a massive, powered rotor that utilized a unique tip-jet system. Compressed air, mixed with fuel and ignited at the rotor tips, created lift without the need for a tail rotor. The result: a smoother transition between vertical and forward flight modes. Inside, it offered spacious seating for 50 passengers and even had clamshell doors for cargo. Yet its futuristic approach wasn’t without drawbacks—most notably, the thunderous noise produced by its rotor jets, earning complaints from both city planners and residents.
Despite these hurdles, the helicopter-plane crossover demonstrated its versatility, setting a world speed record and performing groundbreaking intercity flights. Airlines and militaries expressed interest, but escalating development costs and noise concerns grounded this ambitious project.
To this day, the Rotodyne remains a symbol of what could have been—a marvel of engineering ahead of its time. Interested in more retro-futuristic aircraft tales? Read our previous story on it, or watch the original footage below and share your thoughts.
“Compressed air, mixed with fuel and ignited at the rotor tips, created lift without the need for a tail rotor.”
Wait, what?
If the only torque acting upon the rotor is from the tip jets, there will be no reaction yaw force on the aircraft body. Thus, no tail rotor needed to counter it.
That’s probably not very energy efficient, but no tail rotor is needed nonetheless.
They probably tap the compressed air off of the jet engines used for forward thrust…
I’m not sure what your question is, but I’m assuming it’s about the “no need for a tail rotor” part, and not the fact that this thing had flames shooting out the rotor tips.
Because the main rotor isn’t driven by an engine, no torque is generated about the vertical axis (i.e. no torque to generate yawing motion), so no tail rotor is required to counteract that torque.
Burning fuel this way to generate thrust is not very fuel efficient.
i recall that class of craft are called impulse helicopters. weird that there’s little online about them, unless they’re classified tech. I did see a video about an italian engine company that made such a copter and went bankrupt right after. can’t find it in my history though.
I’ve gotta mention the energy efficiency again.
When you’re fighting against gravity, every drop of fuel counts (and counts against your payload and range).
The purported benefit of eliminating tail rotors is not worth the performance compromises everywhere else.
This particular vehicle, at least, is only meant to operate using tip jets during very short periods of take-off. The vast majority of the time, it autorotates- operating as a large, jet-propelled auto gyro.
^This
Exactly, it’s really an autogyro that can do VTOL, as I understand it.
Great idea. But it was simply too noisy. Supersonic wingtips were also part of the problem.
The Accidental Thunderscreech….brilliant though it was.
“This ingenious design” was experimented by the desperate Germany in WW2 in the Focke-Wulf Triebflügel.
A design they never came close to realizing.
War is good for technology, even if it is absolute evil. If you want to win at war, you need to progress science. Rocket designs, jet aircrafts, helicopters, guided missiles, radar, synthetic rubbers, night vision, microwaves, jerrycans, atomic bombs, mass production of medication (penicillin in this case) are all, if my memory serves me right, WW2 inventions. Even the computer you use to read this came as a result of the works of Konrad Zuse. His son showed me how the computer worked. That was just one war. That war resulted in space travel, the moon landings, satellites. Now think of all the other wars that resulted in a ton of technology. War is evil but it ends up funding a lot of research. I’d give up all that technology for world peace, but that’s sadly not an option.
Needed: A Moral Equivalent of War. (William James/Jimmy Carter).
I thought the 2020 global pandemic might serve, but sadly just seemed to worsen the situation.
Yeah, the level of stupidity went way up with that one, not down as one would have hoped. I’m surprised we weren’t burning witches by the time it was over.
I was with OSMS during the lockdowns and the amount of people I saw rise together to face an inhuman threat was inspiring. Not sure what happened after that.
It’s amazing how creative people can get when other people are trying to kill them.
The first one was invented by Juan de La Cierva in 1920…
That was the autogyro, this is a slightly different thing. Hackaday says it’s a hybrid between a helicopter and an airplane, but as you’ve noticed is more of a hybrid of an autogyro and an airplane
“the thunderous noise produced by its rotor jets”
Which, unfortunately, does not feature in the video.
I think a synchrorotor version of this beast would be just as effective without the noise. Think of it like an unholy union between the Kaman K-max and a C-123 Provider, but with bigger rotor blades.
As the aircraft transitioned to forward flight, power would be pulled from the rotors to let them act like auto gyros. That power could then be transferred to propellers for forward flight. Cross link the engines and drive train for redundancy so the loss of a turbine didn’t mean the loss of all power.
It would need a clutch between the synchrorotor gearbox and the rest of the drive train, and one for each propeller. A pair of PT6A twin-pac units ought to be enough power to run a system that complex. Keep the Kaman trailing edge flaps and rotor set up, and use variable pitch propellers for rudder control.
Thinking about the control design and linkages makes me a little twitchy but I think its doable.
I like the idea of the tip jets. I wonder if this would scale to model size.
quite easily
I still don’t know why the military didn’t adopt this?
In 1957, the British military didn’t have much spare cash for anything that wasn’t part of the nuclear deterrent.
Tip jets are not necessarily required for vertical take-off without a tail rotor. There are jump-take-off capable autogyros that accomplish this by powering the rotor with the engine like a helicopter. I don’t know for sure but they’re probably not excessively loud like tip-jet rotors. They keep the pitch flat so they stay grounded while the main rotor is under power. Once it gets spinning fast enough they cut power to the main rotors and pull the pitch down and the thing shoots up into the air. I bet they have more than usual weight in the rotor tips, and they also need articulated rotor blades which are not usually needed for an autogyro (pitch is usually adjusted by moving the whole rotor head).
The Brits, as so often, ran out of money. The real question is why the US didn’t take over developing the Rotodyne. The noise problem (more of an excuse than a problem) could have been licked for a tiny fraction of the $27 billion it cost us to develop the tiltrotor V-22 Osprey 20 years later, to say nothing of lives lost and the fact that the entire Osprey fleet is now indefinitely sidelined.