Pegasus, the Heart of the Harrier: The History & Development of the World's First Operational Vertical Take-off & Landing Jet Engine

Introduction

The Pegasus engine was a product of the early years of the Cold War, when the possibility of invasion by the Warsaw Pact caused NATO to look afresh at its defences and its vulnerabilities. Although long-range missiles were under development in the early 1950s, the jet engine was in the ascendant as the power for bombers and fighters alike. Supersonic speeds were desired by all air forces, for delivery of weapons and for interception of aggressors.

Part of the price of such performance was the long concrete runway, around which were built fixed bases. Herein lay a vulnerability identified by NATO studies. As a result, means were sought to create aircraft that could operate away from fixed bases and independent of long concrete runways. A step in this direction was taken by the Fiat G91 lightweight fighter, winner of a NATO competition and operated by many European air forces. At the time of its creation a preference was stated for vertical take-off aircraft, but no suitable technology was available to create a high-performance fighter with which NATO forces could strike back if they lost their airfields.

All of this changed when Michel Wibault, an imaginative aircraft designer and manufacturer, proposed a new form of propulsion in which the thrust of the engine could be turned from horizontal through vertical to forwards. The details of Wibault’s proposal were carefully thought through in principle, but in practice they would have been cumbersome and impractical. However, in his ideas was the seed of a revolution, and in the hands of Gordon Lewis, a project engineer in Bristol Aero Engines Ltd, the idea was turned into a workable proposition.

Just over three years later, the resulting engine ran on the testbed, and little more than a year after that it was flying in the revolutionary Hawker P.1127 aircraft. After three-nation trials it entered squadron service in 1969, less than thirteen years after conception. It fought its first war in 1982, and it is arguable that without the ability of the Pegasus to allow such extraordinary manoeuvrability, that war, in the South Atlantic, could probably not have been fought. Today, fifty years after the birth of this extraordinary engine, pioneering in so many ways, it is still flying. The latest version is producing nearly three times as much power as the original, and is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The concept of vertical take-off and landing for combat aircraft has long been dismissed by many, who have coined expressions such as VTOL penalty in an attempt to put it down as something lacking, something that a real pilot, desirous of boring supersonic holes in the sky, would not wish to fly. It is not wise to suggest that to a Marine Corps, RAF or Royal Navy pilot; such men are fiercely loyal to their AV8Bs and GR9s.

It may be that, because of the laws of physics, VTOL aircraft have a geometry that does not favour supersonic flight, but in the roles for which they are built, they do not have to do so. The Pegasus-powered Harrier family of aircraft is based so close to the fighting that supersonics are neither needed nor possible. They have relatively short range for the same reason. They do not rely upon either long, vulnerable concrete runways or large, vulnerable aircraft carriers and their attendant defensive fleets. They do not have a supersonic penalty.

This book is not about the Harrier. It is about the need, the conception, the creation and the operation of the remarkable turbine engine which made the Harrier and other aircraft possible. While biographies of unphotogenic machines such as gas turbines are few in number, the story of the Pegasus is remarkable for the problems it has faced, and the challenges that it has overcome. It is therefore more than a story about a machine: it is also a story of the people who brought it about, and it is intended as much as a tribute to them as to the machine itself.

Chapter 1

The Requirement

The first nuclear policy of NATO

For countless thousands of years, men gazed jealously at birds, envying their ability to rise in the skies, to travel great distances and to be free of earthly shackles. Some adventurous and inventive souls among their number tried to work out how they might join the birds. Icarus, legend tells us, chose bird-like wings of feathers, attached to him with wax. Others looked for a separate structure, into which man introduced himself as controller and passenger. While Leonardo da Vinci anticipated the helicopter, with rotating components to provide lift and motion, Sir George Cayley preferred rigid wings. Down through the years, the thinking and experimentation formed into two schools of thought, with one favouring precise emulation of birds, by using flapping wings. Others looked at soaring birds, and thought in terms of rigid, outstretched wings.

It seems that while many would-be pioneers studied steady-state flight, few looked so intently at means of getting into the air. It came to be realised that any wing, whether flapping or rigid, needs the passage of air over and under it to generate lift. Usually this requires forward motion, but hawks, well known for apparently motionless flight as they study the ground in their search for food, use the currents of air over their wings to sustain them in just the same way as any bird that is moving forwards. When manned flight was achieved, it was also realised that the continued passage of air over the wings was vital for control: ailerons, elevators, rudders and even the Wrights’ favoured wing-warping required the passage of air over surfaces for them to be effective. The question was how to get a machine into the state where the passage of air over wings could raise it, sustain it and allow control. Only then were simple tasks of navigation possible.

When this problem was examined, it was realised, more scientifically by some and less by others, that controlled flight required a significant forward speed to allow wings to generate lift. How was that speed, so vital to achieving flight, to be acquired? Some early students reckoned that some loss of height was a useful means of gaining flying speed, and indeed, to this day, hang-glider pilots, launching themselves from hills and ridges, use this technique. They are emulating those species of birds that use perches: they tend to lose height, however briefly, after launch, simply as a means of gaining flying speed. It is a problem, both for the birds and the hang-glider pilots, that once one has landed on a flat, open space, regaining height to allow a second take-off has to be undertaken. In the case of some species of birds, this is not always practical, and some, once grounded, never fly again.

Those early would-be aviators who studied the birds will have recognised two other distinct techniques of achieving flying speed. Some birds flap their wings while running along the surface to achieve flying speed, while others, with wings of sufficiently large surface area, are strong enough to rise vertically from the surface. This comparison can be seen between ducks, which generally live on the calm waters of rivers and ponds, and gulls, which live at sea and cannot rely upon the waves to provide a smooth surface for take-off or landing. Ducks usually have plenty of space to make a take-off run, using feet was well as wings to get up to flying speed. Gulls, which have to choose their moment more precisely, rise directly from the water, no doubt using more power than ducks to do so. On landing, ducks can plane along the surface, feet firmly down, to lose speed before settling in the water. When landing, gulls again choose their moment, and settle more or less vertically into the water. They are so attuned to vertical landing that they use these techniques even on the still waters of rivers. Birds that use perches fly with sufficient accuracy to reach out to a perch, and land on to it.

Perhaps some of the pioneers did indeed study avian take-off and landing techniques. Samuel Langley chose to launch his aeroplane from a perch, on top of a vessel in the Potomac river. It failed to gain flying speed, and landed immediately in the water. Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian who did much experimental work in France, undertook his early flights from a suspension point under a balloon. The first successful pioneers of powered, heavier-than-air flight, Orville and Wilbur Wright, whose work was contemporary with that of Langley, would have nothing to do with flapping wings, or launching from a perch. They conducted their extraordinarily methodical and patient research with gliders, and in a wind tunnel, then eventually with a machine that, over one hundred years later, we still regard as conventional. Their Flyer could not rise vertically. It needed a stretch of clear, level ground to accelerate to flying speed before the speed of the air over the wings allowed it to rise into the skies, and clear of obstacles beyond that. Landing also required a stretch of cleared, level ground, this providing a space close to the surface in which to lose speed immediately before landing, and then the landing-strip itself.

For fifty and more years, the first requisite of flying was a clear, flat space on the land or on the water. Mainstream aviation was condemned to the availability, maintenance and traffic management of such clear spaces to allow its heavier-than-air machines to explore the freedom of the skies. Furthermore, ever since the Wrights, and because of the fundamental principles that their work established, the conventional aeroplane has always been designed with the engine(s) arranged on a horizontal line to provide the forward thrust required by the wings to generate lift as it accelerated the machine along the ground.

Once in the air, all conventional machines have to rely upon control surfaces that require the passage of air over them to allow them to be effective in controlling the machine. Minimum flying speed and minimum control speed are closely related. Even aeroplanes designed with high-lift wings and other devices to reduce take-off and landing runs have always retained horizontally aligned powerplants while deflecting air down from flaps to achieve some measure of deflected thrust or lift.

The development of the autogyro and the helicopter, both properly described as rotary-wing machines, took place in the first fifty years of powered aviation with ever-increasing success, but neither type of machine has ever usurped the fixed-wing aircraft it its ability to lift loads or reach speeds that were required of the aviation community by the military and civilian alike. The rotary wing is like a large propeller in some respects, but in others it is like a wing. The angle of incidence, the speed through the air, the aspect ratio¹ and the vulnerability to stalling are all issues which confront the designer of rotary and fixed wing alike.

The huge growth in the uses of aviation, reflected in the number of airfields provided, was steady and continuous after the First World War, and received enormous impetus during the Second World War. The greater the number of machines, and the greater the intensity of their use, so the greater was the amount of land that was set aside to permit horizontally aligned aeroplanes to operate. While the Wright Brothers’ first machine weighed seven hundred pounds, and took off in sixty feet using twelve horsepower to carry one man at about thirty miles an hour, a large post-war jet bomber weighed over 200,000 lb, took off in nearly a mile using 40,000 lb of thrust to carry a payload of several tons at very nearly the speed of sound. The infrastructure that such machines demanded was, and still is, colossal. Chief among them was the long concrete runway, with taxiways, hardstandings and service roads connected.

Here was the problem: the greater the speed and performance that man desired, the more reliant he was on the ground to achieve it.

The arrival of the jet engine had made this dependence greater. Although many bomber bases had been given hard surfaces during the Second World War, even the largest piston-engine bombers had big, low-pressure tyres and could operate from grass or crushed rock. The early turbine-powered aircraft, designed to fly at higher speeds than their piston-powered predecessors, required smaller, more highly loaded wings, optimised for high-speed flight. This design feature caused take-off runs to become longer, and turbojet engines used available runway length to accelerate and gain the higher take-off speeds which were the consequence of highly loaded wings. The persistent increase in aircraft weight at that time also encouraged the use of paved runways: increasingly the grass aerodrome, with the flexibility of landing strip that it offered, was paved over to a very fixed and specific length, even to the point of being defined by a painted centre-line, to a similarly specific heading, on which aircraft could land. It was perhaps inevitable that high-performance aircraft were given small, high-pressure tyres to suit operation on concrete, and were not suited to operation from grass airfields.

While the Hurricanes and Spitfires operating from bombed airfields in 1940 could fly from or to any clear strip of grass, more or less into wind, and between the bomb craters, their successors ten years later were restricted to the centre-line of a paved runway. Every such runway was a point of concentration for continued air operations, but it was also a more specifically defined aiming point for the aggressor.

Therein lay the vulnerability of the paved airfield. A pre-emptive strike could remove runways from the use of defending or attacking aircraft long enough for an incoming raid to attack aircraft, hangars and fuel facilities, thus grounding the defences while other aircraft attacked military targets, bridges and land forces. Deprived of air cover, they were then at the mercy of invading forces. This was well established in German techniques of Blitzkrieg during the Second World War even before the paved runway was widely used. The whole theory and practice of air superiority depended entirely upon the freedom to put aircraft into the air, and one of the fundamentals of Blitzkrieg was to deny the enemy the use of his aircraft for self-defence. In the overrunning of the Low Countries in 1940, and in the invasion of Russia in 1941, the aim was to destroy aircraft as they sat on the ground, these being easier targets than whole grass airfields, where there was flexibility in the alignment of airstrips. Another vulnerability of the paved runway is the time taken to construct one. In an expeditionary war, such as undertaken in Kuwait and Iran in the 1990s and later, there was no time to wait for the construction of a new airfield. One of the pilots involved in the Kuwait war, wrote, ‘You need a year to build a 12,000 ft runway, and today’s wars are too fast to accept that.’²

These lessons were well learned by the Russians. In 1948, when the Soviet Union made it clear, through its attempt to isolate Berlin from the Western Powers, that it was taking the stance of a potential aggressor, the strategy of the Western Powers expressed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) had to be reviewed. The acquisition of atomic weapons by the Soviet Union in 1949 accelerated this need, and an urgent review of NATO policies was undertaken. At the time, the current NATO policy was outlined in M.C. 3/5 of 3 December 1952, ‘The Strategic Concept for the Defense of the North Atlantic Treaty Area’. It did not discuss nuclear attack, and talked in defence terms that were rapidly becoming out of date.

The task of reviewing this policy was defined by General Grunther, Supreme Allied Commander, thus: ‘Your task in the future planning is to deny the enemy the knowledge of where he has to strike.’ This was to be achieved by permanent mobility, dispersion and camouflage. The task was entrusted in 1953 to a group established as the Inter-Allied Planning Committee (New Approach Group), but known colloquially as the four ‘hot colonels’. They worked at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), and were Col Andrew Goodpaster, US Army (later Supreme Allied Commander, Europe); Col Robert C Richardson III, US Air Force; Col Ronald Clarence MacDonald, British Army; and Col Pierre Gallois of the French Air Force. They worked together for two years to establish a strategy to deal with the Soviet nuclear threat. Increasing knowledge of the accuracy of Soviet bombers and early missiles, with other information, led to a full realisation that NATO airfields should be regarded as highly vulnerable, because tactical nuclear strikes could not only damage runways, but also remove base facilities, aircraft and personnel. A great deal of analysis went into the study conducted by the four colonels, in which they travelled extensively in a DC-4 made available to them,³ and they used a contract with the Rand Corporation to gather and assemble data.⁴

Their studies identified many items that needed attention within NATO, and their resulting plan, SH/330/54, included a study of all fixed targets, including airfields. This document remains classified to this day, but the overall policy was put forward by the North Atlantic Military Committee as ‘The Most Effective Pattern of NATO Military Strength for the Next Few Years’, document M.C.48, of 22 November 1954, which was subsequently adopted as NATO strategy. It was a significant change from the previous strategy.

The discussion in M.C.48 was dominated by the nuclear threat, and assumed that a Soviet attack would open with intensive atomic strategic air attacks on key installations of NATO, followed by widespread attacks by Soviet army and tactical air forces, in which the ground forces would have a two-to-one superiority over NATO forces. There would also be attacks on NATO naval forces. All attacks would use surprise as an essential element. The studies undertaken by the four colonels included the identification of all airfields that might be used by the Western Powers, and even specified the tactical nuclear tonnage that would be necessary to neutralise them. It was clear that this could be done without destroying adjacent towns and cities, thus denying the West any justification to strike back at major Russian cities.

Commandant Pierre Gallois in 1948, talking to General Velin, while Air Vice-Marshal Tedder listens. (Pierre Gallois Collection)

It was realised that in the light of the nature of such attacks, deterrence was one of the most valuable positions that NATO could adopt, and it was firmly recommended that NATO forces have nuclear capability supported by adequate early-warning systems. Five minimum measures were outlined to increase the deterrent and defensive value of NATO forces. The first four concerned the establishment of integrated nuclear capability within NATO forces, the creation of an alert system and reaction times, means of obtaining warning of attack, and the capabilities of NATO forces and their equipment and readiness.

The fifth read thus:

5. Measures to Enable NATO Forces to Survive Soviet Atomic Attack.

In view of the increasing Soviet atomic capability and the probability of a future war opening with surprise atomic attacks, it is essential that the necessary dispersal and redeployment measures are taken to ensure the survival of NATO forces during the initial phase of hostilities. We must readjust our tactical disposition, improve and augment both passive and active defense measures, and increase unit dispersion and mobility. These measures apply to all forces, air, land and sea alike. We must particularly guard our air forces against such attack by basing them on as many different airfields as possible, by dispersing them to the maximum extent possible on these airfields, and by improving their ability to redeploy to operate from alternate bases at immediate notice.

In other words, there is little use in a grounded aeroplane, however fast it may be in the air.

In practical terms this meant getting military aircraft away from long fixed runways, and from all the features of the fixed bases that were so easy to find and to target. Six years of war in which Allied aerial photographic reconnaissance skills had been developed to find airfields quickly told NATO that the Soviets had to be assumed to have the same capability. It meant operating from temporary sites such as autobahns, cow pastures and clearings in forests, and constantly moving from one site to another. It meant finding a means to develop combat aircraft which had all the manoeuvrability, speed and load-carrying capability of the conventional aircraft of the day, but without the dependence on thousands of yards of highly visible and vulnerable concrete strips. It meant that somehow the aviation industry had to find a practical means, other than the helicopter, which was still in its infancy and was significantly restricted in its capability, to achieve vertical take-off and landing with a fast jet aeroplane.

This wholesale review of NATO strategy, to take account of growing Soviet belligerence and nuclear capability, was directly responsible for the upsurge of interest in vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) combat aeroplanes. At the time that the policy was put into place, virtually nothing had been done to identify ways in which combat aircraft could be designed to use vertical capability to get away from concrete runways and fixed installations. The helicopter and the short take-off and landing (STOL) propeller-driven aeroplane were receiving a lot of attention from air forces and industry, but at the time, the development of combat aircraft was focused almost entirely upon achieving the high dash speeds necessary to intercept high-flying nuclear bombers. Little thought, it seems, was given to the deployment of those interceptors in a way that guaranteed their ability to leave the ground in the first place, or to be able to land safely after their first missions. Correcting this blind spot was part of the thrust of the new NATO strategy.

At the time, the only VTOL project in existence that had any relevance to NATO’s need for high-performance combat aircraft that could be based away from large fixed sites was the US Air Force Ryan X-13. This was not proposed as a production aircraft, but was a demonstrator of many aspects of controlled vertical take-off and landing, devoid of any pretensions to carrying military loads.⁵ Rig work had started in 1950 and had led to the start of construction of a manned prototype in 1954. In addition, Lockheed and Convair were soon to start work on a US Navy requirement for VTOL aircraft, expressed in the XFV-1 and XFY-1 respectively, but these were to meet a requirement for naval convoy defence, and did not have any relevance to land-based requirements in Europe. Similarly, the Socié.té. Nationale d’Etude et Construction de Moteurs d’Aviation (SNECMA) undertook work on early study and rig test work that was to lead to a vertical take-off ramjet-powered aircraft to act as an interceptor of high-level bombers. The work led as far as a device called the Colé.optère, which flew in 1959 and was destroyed on its ninth flight that year. It was an interesting concept, but was far from what NATO had in mind.

While Colonel Pierre Gallois was at SHAPE he was a very busy man. He worked as a hot colonel from eight o’clock until five o’clock each day, and then during the evening, often until midnight or later, he worked as an assistant to the Minister of National Defence. From 8 March 1952 until 19 June 1954, the key years of his work at SHAPE, his minister was René. Pleven, a prominent politician who had had two spells as Prime Minister earlier in the 1950s. Among Pierre Gallois’ responsibilities was the definition of future equipment. This involved having a good knowledge of what the French aviation industry was doing to propose new machines, and ensuring that the industry was appropriately briefed upon French and NATO requirements. He was able to work well with many counterparts in NATO as he spoke fluent English, this dating from his service during the Second World War, flying Free French Halifax bombers from RAF Elvington, near York.

It was while he was at SHAPE that Pierre Gallois met Col John Driscoll, USAF. Driscoll was to become a most important player in the early story of the Pegasus, albeit briefly. He was from Brooklyn, NY, and joined the US Air Force, where among other things he specialised in armaments. He was Chief of Air Weapons and Tactics within the US Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945, in which capacity he first met Charles Lindbergh. He had worked with the French Air Force in Indo-China, advising on new weapons used by the USAF in Korea.

John Driscoll led a colourful and much-travelled service life. He was in Paris because he had been assigned as senior air officer at the Paris office of the Mutual Weapons Development Authority (MWDA).⁶ This was situated in the office of the defense advisor to the US Ambassador to NATO, and was sponsored, if not actually controlled in its day-today work, by the US Department of Defense.⁷ Its purpose was to find work and projects that could be of interest to the NATO alliance, and to assist it by the provision of funds. This was not entirely quixotic: funds were provided under government-to-government agreements that made extensive provision for the United States to receive rights in the resulting work.

Colonels John Driscoll and Pierre Gallois together drafted an Operational Requirement for a Lightweight Tactical Strike Fighter (LWTSF) in 1954. The basic requirement was for short take-off and landing from unprepared fields.⁸ Their preference was for a V/STOL machine, but no technical means of achieving this for a high-performance combat aircraft were then available. NATO, spurred on by General Norstad, the then Supreme Allied Commander, organised a competition for proposals from NATO members. It was won by the Fiat G91 against competition from Dassault, Folland and Breguet. The Fiat aircraft, and all of the competition, used the remarkable Bristol Orpheus engine, with its world-record power-to-weight ratio of 6: 1.

An incident during the development of the LWTSF illustrates John Driscoll’s determined approach to life. In 1954 Col Charles Lindbergh was promoted to brigadier general by President Eisenhower. This promotion led to Lindbergh’s only spell of active duty in the US Air Force. He chose as the subject of his duty the LWTSF, from a list of ten subjects offered by the Secretary of the Air Force. John Driscoll had been appointed as his aide and was undoubtedly instrumental in getting Lindbergh to make this choice.⁹ During a visit to the Pentagon at this time, Driscoll bumped into an Air Force general who asked him if he would attend a meeting of the Air Staff the following day, to brief them on LWTSF. This was important because it was known that the Air Staff were opposed to it. John Driscoll casually asked if he could take someone with him, and this was readily agreed. He took Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh spoke persuasively, but one can imagine the reaction when quite unexpectedly one of aviation’s Gods walked into the meeting.¹⁰

The Requirement. (Rolls-Royce)

Pierre Gallois, as part of his responsibilities at the Defence Ministry, met many leaders of the aviation industry, including Louis Breguet, a competitor for LWTSF, who in the early 1950s had shown some interest in vertical take-off machines, going as far as patenting a device with rotors embedded in the wings.¹¹ He also met a friend of Louis Breguet who had run his own successful aircraft manufacturing company in France from 1919 until 1934, when he sold his company to Louis Breguet. He had remained active in aviation, and for some years had been looking at various solutions to the problems of vertical flight. His name was Michel Wibault.

_______________

1 The ratio of length to width (chord).

2 Lt Col Dick White, within Shield and Storm, ed. John Godden, 1994.

3 So described to the author by General Pierre Gallois, 24 January 2007, but probably the military equivalent, the C-54.

4 Conversation with Gen Pierre Gallois, 24 January 2007.

5 Rotary-wing and propeller-driven aircraft are not included here because they were never designed at that time to undertake combat missions. Many published books about VTOL aircraft cover all physical forms of vertical aircraft, and all mechanical means of operating them, without adequately distinguishing between their roles and responsibilities.

6 MWDA was established under the provisions of a treaty, the Mutual Weapons Development Pact (MWDP). Many documents refer, correctly, to the provision of funding by from MWDP, while others refer to their administration by the team (MWDT). These expressions are used interchangeably.

7 MWDA papers remain classified by NATO. This is not thought to be because of their nature, but because NATO has not yet established a programme for their declassification. The same applies to SHAPE documents.

8 Letter John Driscoll to John Fozard, 12 January 1991. Brooklands Aviation Museum, Hawker Papers.

9 John Driscoll, within book review, 28 October 1990. The book was VTOL Military Research Aircraft, by Mike Rogers.

10 Taped conversation, John Driscoll and Len Deighton, 16 June 1991.

11 French patent 1,068,404; GB patent 744,107.

Chapter 2

The Ingenious

Michel Wibault

The grandfather of vectored thrust

Michel Henri Marie Joseph Wibault was born in Sin-le-Noble, a suburb of Douai, in northern France, on 5 June 1897. His father, Achille Wibault, was a successful grocer, owning about a hundred shops under the name of Wibault in northern France. His mother, Madeleine, had three sons and three daughters. At the age of four, Michel Wibault was stricken with poliomyelitis, as a result of which he received no formal schooling. What he learned came from books, the family, kindly friends, and a German nanny, Fraulein Teifel. It was perhaps inevitable, as he grew up during the pioneering days of aviation, and with so many fellow Frenchmen swept up in it, that he would show an early interest in flying-machines. What clinched it was the presence in Douai, at the airfield known as la Breyelle, of the works of the aviation pioneer Louis Breguet. Michel Wibault was introduced to Louis Breguet, and so came into close contact with aeroplanes.

Michel Wibault with his test pilot, Gustav Douchy. (Alain Wibault Collection)

Not only was Louis Breguet building conventional aeroplanes, but in 1907 he designed and built what some regard as the world’s first helicopter. His Gyroplane No. 1 had very limited success, largely because although it lifted itself from the ground,¹ with a M. Volumard aboard, it possessed inadequate means of control in the air. It was replaced in 1908 by Gyroplane No. 2, which made a few successful flights before being severely damaged in a heavy landing. It was rebuilt as No. 2 bis, but Louis Breguet soon abandoned his interest in vertical flight until the 1930s.

Unfortunately one can only speculate as to the extent to which the young Michel Wibault was a witness to any of this effort, but it is known that he was much influenced by aeroplanes, and spent much of his youth in and around the Breguet factory, learning all he could about aviation. His disability kept him from customary youthful pursuits, and from military service during the Great War. In fact, Douai was occupied by the Germans, and the family house, a substantial mansion built by Wibault père as befitted a successful businessman, was used as a billet for several German officers. For over two years, until February 1917, the family lived behind the German lines, but Michel avoided contact with the invaders, spending much of the war in Belgium, and then Switzerland. He never cared for the Germans again.

His handicap did not impede his imagination or his creativity. Once he was sitting at his drawing-board, pencil locked in his hand, his brain overcame all handicaps and there was no holding him.² Certainly, surviving examples of his draughtsmanship show a very acute ability.

In 1918, when not yet 21 years of age, and notwithstanding his physical handicaps, he built his first aeroplane, and in 1919 created his own company, SA Michel Wibault, at Billancourt, south-west of Paris. Members of the family helped financially. For the next fifteen years he built conventional aeroplanes of increasing technical competence. He was a pioneer of all-metal construction, and took out several patents, not only for the designs of wings and fuselages, but also for methods of manufacture. Some of these were licensed to Vickers Ltd in the 1920s, and although none led to large-scale production runs for the British company, they did at least serve the purpose of introducing Vickers to all-metal construction. The Viastra, built according to the Wibault patents, was used by the Prince of Wales.

Among the engines that Michel Wibault used for his own designs were the nine-cylinder Bristol Jupiter and five-cylinder Titan. Both were licence-built by Gnome-Rhône, and so although the connection was a step removed from direct dealings, the foundation of knowledge of, and respect for, Bristol products was thus laid.

Although he wanted business for his own company, he was not averse to licensing designs: in 1926 he succeeded in having many fighter aircraft of his design built in Poland. This was one of the earliest examples of such international collaboration in the aircraft industry. His reputation as a distinguished aeronautical engineer was recognised in 1931, when he was appointed a Chevalier de la Lé.gion d’Honneur. In 1934 he produced the Wibault 382, a three-engine airliner which proved profitable. It also had the distinction of appearing on a French postage stamp.

Later that year Michel Wibault sold his business to Breguet; by then he knew Louis Breguet well, and he maintained contact with him, in various ways, for the remainder of his life, but he was not content to rest at the mere age of 40. His urge to create machines led him back into design work in 1938, when he was invited by the French government to design and build a new four-engine airliner capable of carrying seventy-two passengers on two decks connected by a spiral staircase, and which included a cuisinier in its crew. The machine, the Wibault 1.00, would have had a top speed of 265 mph. The first prototype was built at l’Arsenal de l’Aeronautique at Villacoublay, south-west of Paris. In June 1940, as the Germans invaded France, the prototype lacked one of its four engines, and thus it could not be moved to safety. It is generally accepted that the Wibault 1.00 was destroyed in an air raid on Villacoublay on 3 June 1940, but Alain Wibault is adamant that to prevent it falling into German hands Michel Wibault destroyed it by fire.³

On 17 June 1940 Michel Wibault and his wife Marie-Rose, whom he had married in March 1930, left Bordeaux on the SS Anadyr, carrying aeroplanes and troops. The Germans were advancing through France; confusion, countermanded orders and submarine attacks were all encountered before a Royal Air Force Short Sunderland, powered by four Bristol Pegasus piston engines, escorted the ship safely into Gibraltar. From there Michel and Marie-Rose travelled to England, where they made contact with General de Gaulle. Michel Wibault joined France Forever, within which he was appointed technical director by de Gaulle. Soon, Michel and Marie-Rose were on their way to America.

Marie-Rose Wibault. (Michel de Chollet Collection)

Michel Wibault had to find employment, and he had to gain permission to remain in America. Before long he had made contact with the aviation community, and became a consultant with Republic Aviation, of Farmingdale, New York. It was almost certainly through this connection, perhaps before it matured into employment, that he met Major-General Delos Emmons, who at the time was commanding general of Headquarters Air Force at Langley Field, Virginia. In a letter dated 18 October 1940, Emmons wrote to the Consul-General of the United States to sponsor the Wibaults within the then immigration quota.⁴ It is not known what other support Michel Wibault was able to muster, but it certainly worked. By December 1940 he was carrying an identity card describing him as a consultant representing the Royal Canadian Air Force, and giving his address as 30, Rockefeller Plaza, New York City.

In 1939 Marie-Rose Wibault had met Winthrop Rockefeller, introduced by Thomas Hamilton of the Standard Propeller Company.⁵ She in turn introduced her husband to Winthrop Rockefeller in New York in 1940. At the time of his going to America, Wibault was 43, Rockefeller some fifteen years younger. And yet they hit it off, and Rockefeller eventually registered the Vibrane Corporation to support Michel Wibault’s creative work and to provide a sponsor for his patent applications in the United States.

Winthrop Rockefeller c.1950, when he is believed to have started supporting Michel Wibault. (Winthrop Rockefeller Collection, University of Arkansas at Little Rock Archives & Special Collections)

Marcel Riffard,⁶ the French aeronautical engineer, noted that Michel Wibault was working as a consultant for Republic Aviation, and that he assisted in the design of the Republic Rainbow. This started life as a remarkable four-engine airliner of exceptional speed, but which had to be redesigned to act as a reconnaissance aircraft during the war. Both were in the hands of Alexander Kartveli, but it is understood that Michel Wibault was involved in the design work. Perhaps it was, for him, a chance to reincarnate the Wibault 1.00. It was designated the XF-12, and was designed to undertake not only photographic reconnaissance at 40,000 ft and 460 mph, but also to provide space for a dark-room and photographic interpreters. Two aircraft flew, and the remarkable performance was proved, but the project was terminated because of the end of the war, and the task was handed to aircraft of lesser performance. The XF-12 design was then revised for commercial use, but it was not built. Michel Wibault’s other work at Republic included assisting in the design of the distinctive little Republic Seabee amphibian.

Michel Wibault remained in America for some years after the war, but at some point, certainly before the end of 1954, he made a second home, in Paris.⁷ After this he spent six months alternately in Paris and New York, and for several years was resident, for tax purposes, in the USA rather than France. When the Republic project was wound up, he seems to have settled down as an aeronautical consulting engineer, and at one time he proposed the establishment of a US-registered company called Wibault Engineering. Theodor von Kármán was to be a member of the board, to carry out commercial exploitation of a dessicant called Carbagel. No further information on this venture has been discovered.

At this time he was funded, or at the least significantly supported, by Winthrop Rockefeller. This was because of personal friendship and a common interest in aeronautics. In the years 1950–56 Winthrop Rockefeller gave over $3 million to charitable causes, and included were various organisations related to aeronautics.⁸ It is doubted if Michel Wibault’s activities generated much money, and Rockefeller’s interest was almost certainly not for any hope of financial return. Some of the support was in the form of loans from Vibrane, but it is known that Winthrop Rockefeller made several payments to Michel Wibault out of his own pocket, without any expectation of seeing the money returned. An escrow agreement between them, signed in July 1962, records that payments received by the bank from royalty fees should be split 23/47ths to Wibault and 24/47ths to Rockefeller, subject to a maximum payment to Rockefeller of $195,210.59,⁹ plus interest at 4%. After Michel Wibault’s death, his family joined together to repay loans Michel Wibault had taken from Vibrane, and it is probable that the sum mentioned above is the amount outstanding at the time of the execution of the escrow agreement.

There was a rumour, among some who knew Michel Wibault late in his life, that his wife was in some way involved in the financial arrangements with Winthrop Rockefeller, but although Marie-Rose Wibault had something of a reputation among wealthy and influential men, this has not been supported by any evidence of an affair between them. However, it is a fact that at some time, probably after the war, Michel and Marie-Rose decided to live separately, even though there was no legal separation between them.¹⁰

While he was still spending much time in America in the early 1950s, Michel Wibault continued in his inventive ways. For a while he worked on a device called undulatory propulsion, which is believed to have been applicable to marine vessels. Later he worked on a device called a discopter, and this is believed to have been his first attempt to improve upon the helicopter. For some reason not found in any papers, he spent a lot of his time looking into the challenges of vertical flight, and it is intriguing to wonder why this appealed to him. Perhaps it was his restless, enquiring and above all inventive mind, unable to find outlets in physical activity because of his crippled limbs. Maybe he had, indeed, seen Breguet’s first essays into helicopters in 1907. Or perhaps he had met some of the later vertical-flight pioneers, such as Igor Sikorsky, who had established a plant at Stratford, Connecticut. A stronger possibility is that Michel Wibault had learned that Louis Breguet had been working on vertical flight again; perhaps he saw the chance of employment with Breguet. In late 1952 Breguet’s work on lift fans within wings, driven by a compressor blowing air onto tip turbines, and supplemented by combustion chambers injecting hot gas into the propulsive air, had reached a point where Breguet could apply for a patent. He did this on 18 December 1952.¹¹

Michel Wibault’s first Gyropter patent showed the enclosed rotor discharging through an annulus. (US patent 2807428)

Centrifugal compressors appeared in the second Wibault patent. (US patent 2930546)

The second proposal had a bicycle undercarriage supported by outriggers, anticipating the P. 1127 by three years. (US patent 2930546)

Means of control through a ring in the discharge recognised the ineffectiveness of conventional control surfaces at zero speed. This is the third Wibault patent. (US patent 2838257)

A cross-section of the third patented device, showing the drive of the centrifugal compressor. (US patent 2838257)

Michel Wibault’s work on vertical flight started from his determination to address one of the inherent limitations of helicopters, which, as stated in his first relevant patent,¹² was that as speed increased, the centre of lift moved away from the axis of the rotor. Stability was thus compromised and could be lost. Wibault’s solution was to enclose the rotor entirely within the fuselage, which in consequence was of circular or delta planform. He envisaged the horizontal rotor as a large centrifugal blower, with air taken in near its vertical axis, on the upper surface, and discharged below it through an annulus. In the path of the air as it was discharged through the annulus, Wibault provided for vanes, which would straighten the flow and could be used to direct air for horizontal flight. He also envisaged other means of propulsion, as well as conventional flying controls. He stated that the body of the aircraft should have an aerofoil cross-section to aid in producing lift in forward flight.

The US patent, duly applied for on 15 July 1953, with Michel Wibault named as inventor and Winthrop Rockefeller’s Vibrane Corporation named as assignee, described all of this in considerable detail. This included the proposal that larger machines should have more than one lift rotor. The accompanying sketches showed a machine with three, with one leading and the other two on axes arranged in triangular planform with it. The device was also the subject of British and French patent applications.¹³, ¹⁴

In the US and British patents, Michel Wibault referred to the machine as a ‘Gyropter’. In the French patent he used the French form ‘Gyroptère’. The English form of this term followed Michel Wibault’s various inventions through to his crucial proposal of 1956, and as the application date for the two English-language patents preceded that of the French patent, the name was first published in its English form. It is used thus in this work.

Less than a year after the first patent was applied for, Michel Wibault had refined his thinking and had applied for a second US patent.¹⁵ He had sensed, with his first concept, that high-speed flight might only be obtainable with a second dedicated powerplant. In the second concept, he dispensed with rotors in the style of the helicopter, and instead used two large centrifugal compressors as a means of delivering a larger quantity of air. The performance of such compressors was by now well known from their use in turbine engines, and in superchargers. The compressors were arranged horizontally on vertical axes, fore-and-aft in one version, side-by-side in another, and one above the other in a third. In all cases they discharged air downwards for lift, or rearwards for propulsion, in both cases through rectangular discharge outlets. They could be driven by a single power source, although Michel Wibault preferred two for safety, but either way they achieved one of his aims, which was to have a common power source for both lift and propulsion, rather than separate systems. He had realised that to carry dead lift engines around for most of a flight was neither economical nor efficient. It is possible that by now, although Breguet’s lift-fan patent had not yet been published, Wibault knew of its principles, for he, too, provided for burning fuel in the airflow to enhance the power output.

In this second concept, Michel Wibault laid down some of the vital principles for vertical flight. The jets used for moving vertically were to be disposed around the centre of gravity of the machine. The vertical jets could be used for sustaining the aircraft at low speeds, where aerodynamic lift over wings was not sufficient. Indeed, while the second and third versions of the machine had delta wings, the first had none, and relied on body shape to generate lift in forward flight.

Two other features of these concepts are of interest. Within the description of the first, the accompanying drawings show the use of a bicycle undercarriage, supplemented by outriggers, in much the same style as adopted on the P.1127 a few years later; and within the description of the third concept, in which the two centrifugal compressors are placed on the same axis, one above the other, the accompanying text states ‘… are preferably rotated in opposite directions on the shaft… so as to reduce the secondary gyroscopic effects’. This was an arrangement that was to reappear in the history told here, but it was not new in its application to aviation. Bristol Aero Engines had a project called BE30, launched on 29 December 1953, for a supersonic turbojet with contra-rotating spools.

Lastly, it is interesting that the text includes these words: ‘Another object is to provide an aircraft, of the character indicated, in which approach and discharge ducts¹⁶ are correlated in such a way as to keep them short, with the minimum number of changes in the direction of flow, and resulting in high efficiency.’ The thoughts behind these words will recur several times in this story.

Michel Wibault arrived at the definitive Gyropter with his fourth patent, with vertically disposed centrifugal compressors. (French patent 1120545)

The compressors could he in multiples of two, with engines disposed as shown in the diagrams at the right. (French patent 1120545)

From this enhanced understanding of the needs of gas flow, Michel Wibault pressed on. He had realised that his concepts required some very positive form of control, when forward speed was insufficient to allow conventional controls such as ailerons and elevators to be effective, simply because there was inadequate air flowing over them. He proposed, in a third patent,¹⁷ that within each of the discharge ducts of the centrifugal compressors there should be a control ring. This was movable, and connected to the pilot’s control column. The control rings were established on the axis of each compressor, but could be moved off that axis, to alter the velocity of the air fore and aft or on the sides, thus allowing the aircraft to be pitched or rolled as the pilot wished.

On 12 January 1955 he applied for a fourth patent concerning vertical flight, and he did so without any reference to the Vibrane Corporation being made. The first filing was in France, stating that he was a resident of that country. Nearly a year later, on 3 January 1956, he made simultaneous applications in Great Britain and the United States,¹⁸ of which the former gave his address as 41 Avenue Paul Doumer, Paris 16e, Seine, France.¹⁹ A supplement was made to the French application, to add more claims, but the applications in Great Britain and the United States were made complete with the additional material.

The new claims made a significant step forward. Until this point, Michel Wibault had been concentrating on concepts that all involved rotors and centrifugal compressors arranged horizontally on a vertical axis. This he now changed. In the first filing of his fourth patent he showed two machines, one with a pair of vertically disposed centrifugal compressors, which he called blowers, one behind the other on the centre-line of the machine. In the other, there were two pairs of such compressors, with one pair on each side of the fuselage. All of them were arranged within scrolls, or spiral casings, which could be rotated about the horizontal axis so that the air discharged from them could be directed down for lift or to the rear for propulsion.

Although the sketches commonly used in patent applications are necessarily simple, needing only to demonstrate the principles, and make no pretence at offering specific designs, there is no doubt that the machines contemplated in this proposal were for combat. It is clear that his thinking was moving towards specific designs rather than mere principles.

In this new arrangement Michel Wibault’s inventiveness made a vital and necessary leap forward. He provided that the compressors were driven by a shaft turbine engine; in the US patent he went so far as to state that the Bristol BE25 engine²⁰ was an example of the type he had in mind. He had looked at the Rolls-Royce RB109 (which was to become the Tyne), but had realised that the BE25 could provide all the necessary power from one engine. He obtained performance data for the BE25 from Bristol in 1955, thought to be the time at which the BE25 came off the Secret List in Great Britain.²¹ It is clear that he had been in correspondence with Bristol following his examination of the BE25; from this time he undertook to keep Bristol’s technical director, Stanley Hooker, aware of the work that he was doing.²² He provided for burning fuel within the exit passage from each compressor, to be used for boosting thrust, in the manner of an afterburner.

‘More escargot than cargo’ was John Driscoll’s description of the ultimate Wibault VTOL machine. Four Bristol Orion engines were to drive sixteen compressors, carrying sixty-six passengers on two decks. (French patent 1120545)

In effect, what Michel Wibault had done by proposing vertical compressors was to recognise that the solution to high-performance vertical-take-off aircraft lay in its engine, not in its airframe. He maintained in his earlier proposal, quite correctly, that the thrust from the compressors should be delivered through the centre of gravity of the aircraft. Up to this point, and for years afterwards for those who did not understand the importance of this change of thinking, airframe companies had sought the answer to vertical flight by means of extraordinary changes to the conventional airframe. Now, at last, it was realised that the design of the powerplant was the key, through variable geometry, to directing the power for vertical flight and for cruise, with equal facility.

Michel Wibault went further. His earlier thinking on control during vertical flight was developed, and he now proposed that air or gas bled from the turbine engines should be fed to the nose, tail and wing tips to provide stabilisation at speeds where the ordinary flying control surfaces are ineffective.

He also anticipated the need for such an aircraft to operate from ‘any kind of landing ground’. His proposal of skids for this purpose was not, in the event, practical, but there is a strong possibility that before the patent application had been made in January 1955, he had recognised that NATO’s requirements were going to be changed to call for more flexible aircraft.

At about this time Michel Wibault considered a design for a supersonic aircraft with twelve compressors, and a long slim fuselage, very small wings, powered by two Turbomeca Turmo III engines. Nothing more is known about this.²³

Late in December 1955 Wibault filed an addition to his fourth patent. This supplement contemplated a transport aircraft, with four engines driving no fewer than sixteen vertically arranged centrifugal blowers. Once again the Bristol BE25 was suggested as typical of the engine required. The exhausts of the engines were directed to the rear, to provide additional propulsion, although they were also equipped with deflectors so that they added thrust in the same plane as the compressors, whichever way they were directed. The resulting transport aircraft would have been very large by contemporary standards. A central passenger cabin was provided over the main spar of the small, swept wing. Seats for thirty-six passengers were accommodated upstairs, with another thirty below, the two cabins being connected by a spiral stair in one rear corner. The compressors took up most of the fuselage, and were arranged with eight ahead of this cabin, and eight to its rear. Typically with patent documentation, no dimensional or other data were given, and we are left to speculate on its practicality, price and performance.

Colonel John Driscoll, who connected Colonel Gallois, Michel Wibault and Stanley Hooker. The insignia on his left breast is that of SHAPE, with the motto Vigilia Pretium Libertatis: Vigilance, the Price of Liberty. (SHAPE Historic Section)

It was probably at some time in 1955 that Michel Wibault had decided that his various permutations of vertical flight had reached a point where he could take a step towards reducing it all to practice. As a well-established member of the aeronautical community, he had access to the French Defence Ministry. It is known that Michel Wibault met Colonel Gallois and discussed his proposals with him, and that Gallois was very encouraging, as was Gallois’ chief, Defence Minister René Pleven. Michel Wibault learned that NATO defence policy was being reformed in the light of the nuclear threat from the Russians, and that this included a recognition that if hostilities broke out, Allied airfields would be under immediate threat of destruction. As a consequence, NATO required to find means of dispersing combat and support aircraft to temporary bases. Such bases would of necessity be crude, and would probably not have anything like paved runways. That was understandably all the encouragement that Michel Wibault needed, to move away from the simple sketches and idiosyncratic language of the patent application, into hard proposals for real aeroplanes.

In spite of the support of Colonel Gallois and his minister, Michel Wibault was unable to get any useful interest from the French Air Staff, who said that they were much more interested in the lift-jet approach being demonstrated by Rolls-Royce with its Thrust Measurement Rig,²⁴ or from the French aircraft industry, which was more interested in what the Air Staff wanted.²⁵ Both Breguet and Dassault turned him away.

He also went to see General de Gaulle, who had yet to return to politics, but whom Michel Wibault knew from his appointment as technical director of France Forever during the war. De Gaulle, he no doubt hoped, would have some influence with the French military establishment. De Gaulle told him not only that there was no money for such a machine, but that Wibault had probably got his sums wrong anyway. Michel Wibault told de Gaulle that he would approach the British and Americans.²⁶

Wibault was not without friends. Some time earlier he had had a meeting with Theodor von Kármán, chairman of NATO’s Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development (AGARD), and Colonel John Driscoll of MWDA in his capacity as an executive member of AGARD’s Flight Test Panel. According to John Driscoll,²⁷ Wibault went to discuss his transport aeroplane ideas with AGARD. It is probable that the meeting was brought about by Colonel Gallois, although it is possible that Wibault was already acting as a consultant to MWDA.

The date, 1953 according to Driscoll, but almost certainly later, suggests that Wibault’s work on the addition to his fourth patent was sufficiently well advanced for this to be discussed at that time.²⁸ John Driscoll later lightly referred to that sixteen-blower transport as ‘more escargot than cargo in the fuselage’, but in 1954 he had another meeting with Michel Wibault, in the MWDA offices, and urged him to use the centrifugal blower idea as the basis of a proposal for a lightweight fighter that could interest NATO.

If we accept that the dates on the patent applications reflect the order in which Wibault was doing his work, then by the time he went to AGARD he had already formulated his ideas on aircraft smaller than the big sixteen-blower transport. It could well have been Driscoll’s encouragement that caused him to prepare more detailed designs, and then a brochure with which to promote them.

At the time that the new NATO policy was formulated, there was no known technology that would answer the need. In response to other requirements, NATO had soon established a NATO Basic Military Requirement (NBMR) for a lightweight strike fighter (NBMR-1) and for a maritime patrol aircraft (NBMR-2), and these were within the industry’s capability to produce very competently.²⁹ In due course, NBMR-3 would call for a VTOL strike aircraft, but the enabling technology had yet to be found.

It is almost certain that Michel Wibault started work on the design of an aircraft to meet NATO requirements in 1954, before he filed an application for what was to become his fourth patent in January 1955, and certainly before the addition was filed at the end of that year. During 1955 he had some assistance from the chief aerodynamicist at Breguet to supplement his own inclination to be a very practical and experienced engineer.³⁰ Throughout his work on vertical flight, it is certain that he was working on practical solutions, with a view to manufacture and