At a period when the Cold War was brewing, the U.S. military had in its hands rather ambitious projects to secure technological superiority. One of these was the Avrocar, a VTOL developed at Avro Aircraft Ltd. of Canada. Looking exactly like the flying saucer obsession of the time, this disk-shaped vehicle promised a revolution in both combat and reconnaissance flying. Contrasted with this visionary design and idealistic ambition was the Avrocar project, which would eventually fail to live up to its expectations.
The Avrocar was conceptualized at a time when conventional runways were considered highly vulnerable targets in case of Soviet attacks. This fleet of VTOL aircraft visualized by the U.S. military could be based underground in bunkers and pop out of shafts to take off and land vertically for protection from enemy bombers, thereby giving them a strategic advantage. The Avrocar was meant to reach Mach 4 and 100,000 feet, far beyond that attainable by conventional aircraft like the SR-71 Blackbird.
Financed initially by the Canadian government, it was taken over by the US military in 1958. The US Army saw the Avrocar as a potential all-terrain transport and reconnaissance vehicle, and so did the US Air Force in terms of being a stealthy, supersonic fighter. These grand expectations seemed to overshoot a project already weighed down by large technical difficulties from the very start.
The Avrocar design powered by a single “turbo rotor” was supposed to exploit the Coanda effect for lift and thrust. In reality, flight testing showed that the vehicle suffered from severe stability problems. It was capable only of hovering at about three feet and reached a top speed of 35 mph. Wind tunnel testing carried out at the Ames Research Center of NASA and evaluations made at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base confirmed that the Avrocar design was aerodynamically unstable and uncontrollable at higher speeds.
Development of the Avrocar was captured in a set of progress report films now located at the NARA. The films show the construction, modification, and testing of the vehicle from February 1958 through June 1961. After a series of modifications aimed at improving stability and control, the Avrocar remained troubled by a host of issues, including an uncontrollable rolling motion called “hubcapping.”
By the end of 1961, it was widely realized that to implement a project with the specified parameters, a radical re-designing would be required. The Avrocar project was therefore cancelled by the Pentagon in December of that year. Its failure notwithstanding, the Avrocar furnished some basic lessons for VTOL aircraft and hover technology yet to come.
Today, one of the Avrocar prototypes rests on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. It is an artifact of the ingenuity of the Cold War period that reminds one of its reach-for-sky ambition of flawed innovation in aeronautics.