Ideas that didn' fly
 

I was reading the MLS thread and I realized that over the years a number of ideas appeared very bright as they were launched only to be abandoned only few years later. Besides the MLS, what are the ideas you remember that appear and went out of sight some time later without any commercial application?

Thanks for the idea

Supersonic airliners.

PDR

He said with out commercial application PD. 27.5 years of passenger carrying on Concorde, though economics can be argued about.

Bit of a strange wording. MLS has/had a commercial application - as mentioned in the thread.

I stand by my statement. Concorde never had a commercial appl;ication, just a political one. If there had been a commercial application then others would have followed.

PDR

But you could add FIDO to the list, and commercial fixed-wing VTOL/ASTOVL (HS140/141, Dornier Do31 developments etc). And of course there was nuclear-powered aircraft (NB-36/X-6/Tu-119 etc).

PDR

Two segment noise abatement approach.
Aircraft would remain high over populated areas, descending at 5-6 deg to intercept a 3 deg GS at 1000 ft for landing.
Never progressed in commercial aviation as engine and airframe noise reduction gave similar benefits. However the idea was used by the space shuttle as a landing flare aid.

The Fairey Rotodyne!

BA have carried out two-segment approach trials at Heathrow in the last year or so, using both B777 and A380.

The Prone Meteor.
A Meteor 8 with what looked like a glider cockpit welded to the nose.
In it, a second pilot would lie flat on his stomach with his head supported by a chin rest clutching a mini control column and throttles.

Great when pulling "G" especially if you didn't like the seated pilot behind you.

I had it in the Colerne Museum and it was last seen in the Cosford collection.

The Saunders Roe SR53 and SR177 rocket powered fighters. The Saunders Roe Princess flying boat and SR A/1 , in fact, anything built by Saunders Roe after WW2 that was meant to go more than a few inches above the surface.

So what were all those passengers paying for, if not for commercial transportation?

Brabazon.

Rotordyne - what a machine that was - remember seeing it, and hearing it, at White Waltham

Hydrogen fuel (Lockheed Tristar was the lead type for this idea).

Ekranoplan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Sea_Monster

Short Mayo Composite

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Mayo_Composite


Scheduled service city-to-city helicopters

Hughes H-4 Hercules, or more commonly known as the "Spruce Goose".

The passengers werer paying for flights, but the operatiopn was not a viable commercial proposition unless the development costs were written-off and funded by the government (ie the taxpayer). >99% of those who paid for it never got to use the product. Ergo it was a purely political, rather than commercial, venture.

PDR

What might be termed commercial is perhaps tenuous, but the Short Mayo referred to by WHBM actually made the first east to west trans Atlantic commercial flight by a heavier than air machine, carrying 1,000 pound of mail/freight/newsreel. It performed other commercial flights as well, South Africa being one, prior to war breaking out.

PD, I wonder how many of the British airline manufacturing ventures made a profit? I'm guessing not too many based on the numbers sold. Viscount probably the only one.

Doesn't that describe almost every military aircraft programme. And a fair few civil ones as well. Even the Boeing 707 would not have got going were it not for it's military-funded predecessor KC-135.

Well before its time and it had an outstanding payload/empty weight ratio.

(But there's only on "r" in its name - it was the Rotodyne).

Oh I don't know the Scout and Wasp seemed to have done a good job.
Even the Skeeter taught the army what you could do with a helicopter (admittedly the Skeeter did on occasions struggle to get more than a few inches off the ground)

I'm not trying to make some anti-concorde point, I'm just observing that no one has ever succeeded in designingv & developing a supersonic airliner as a viable commercial proposition. Plenty of airliners have been designed and developed and have recovered their investment from sales, and military aircraft are commercial proposition almost by definoition (because it's almost universally true that the intended customer pays up-front for the development).

But the original question was looking for tgings which have been developed and then discovered to have no commercial application. I would suggest that the inability to recover development costs from sales (historic and future, IMHO) puts the concept of supersonic airliners firmly in this category.

PDR

The Tarrant Tabor..............

How about Prop fans -got trialed on DC9s/MD80 test beds but went no further.

Offset nose gear, OK they did fly commercially on Tridents but no-one else adopted them. Giant aerodynamic shock bodies a la CV 990 come into this category too.

Nuclear power -I think there was nuclear powered B36 but only one and the idea was never revived.

Composite -not in the carbon fibre sense-aircraft .ie one carrying another. Short Mayo flying boat/seaplane combo and B36 (again) carrying a couple of miniature jet fighters along with it

Many weird Brit innovations from the 1950s as already alluded to in earlier posts

Going right back, the Wright Flyer..warping wings.

The Heathrow/Gatwick helilink was a highly successful operation that ran for many years.

Personal rocket backpacks fit the OP's criteria pretty well.

The Fairey Rotodyne, Saunders Roe Princess and the TSR2 were the stuff of dreams and endless fascination when I was young. They were about the most exiting things around and "The Future" according to "Look and Learn", "Ranger" and other publications. Later Concorde entered my consciousness, then became reality, unlike the Rotodyne and Princess. Those three did fly.

The Tarrant Tabor most certainly did not, and is thus a fine contender if you literally follow the title of this thread.

Another fine contender is the Piasecki Helistat, though it did just manage to crawl briefly into the air before disintegrating!

Any aircraft that billed itself as "the DC-3 replacement", although to be fair, the F-27 did quite well.

WHBM
Apologies for repeating the composite concept -I didn't see your mention of the Short Mayo on first reading.

I dont think 'verti planes 'took off' either other than as military prototype . A convair somethign i thing with immense contra rotating props and a very short fuselarge it sat on its tail for a vetical take off-that worked but reversing the process to land...... well apparently thatwas even more difficult than it sounds
PB

AMK anti-misting Kerosene.

I was going to mention prop fans and also Allen Poulson's idea of adding a fan behind the Spey engined Gulfstream. Noise was the biggest killer of the prop-fan closely followed by weight and extra maintenance.

Percival P.74

"anything built by Saunders Roe after WW2 that was meant to go more than a few inches above the surface."

A touch unfair.
They were asked to build various aircraft by the Government. They did, and they all fulfilled the specification. It's not their fault if the specification was bonkers or out of date.

You've also forgotten the Black Knight research rocket and the Black Arrow satellite launcher. Both very successful All got more than an inch off the ground.,

Read the "Sporty Game" by John Newhouse PD. Even those we might consider successful never recovered development costs. Among others he quotes the DC-9, DC-8 and L-1011 ($2.5 billion in the hole). So the Concorde is no different, except in the former it was shareholders who paid, and taxpayers in the latter.

@megan, I'm sure you're reporting Newhouse accurately, but I find this astonishing. Is it really the case that Douglas's two most successful jet airliners were loss makers? Is this by the real books, or is it Hollywood accounting? And if this was the real case, why on earth did they go on with airliners?

If I am remembering correctly a lot of Lockheed's troubles with the 1011 arose when the RB-211 did not work with the composite materials that were planned for the fan blades.

I believe that problem cost RR a bundle, (and perhaps the UK taxpayers ??) and gave Lockheed a big problem.

I spent some time on the L-1011, primarily the -500 and I thought it was probably the aircraft I enjoyed the most in my time. Not just for the flight crew but the cabin layout we had was something I have not seen since. F/C at least.

Edgley Optica - could it ever have been better than a heli for observation?

Large turboprop civil transports - The order books for the Britannia, Vanguard and Electra did not justify their development, albeit of course the Britannia and Electra were splendid airliners. The planform has not emerged again. On the other side of the wall, I accept the Il-18 was built in good numbers, but only 32 Tu-114's emerged from the shed.

To take a slight left turn from PDR1's Concorde line, maybe we can add "fast civil transports", the original failed attempt to establish this brand being the CV880 and CV990. Post SSC, Boeings subsequent paper Sonic Cruiser ended up in the waste paper basket

There's a few here, in the video below, that didn't quite make it to "commercial success". :)

At Marshalls we were making bits for the carbon fan RB211 - there was huge disappointment it did not work, and many were so keen to see RR get out of the hole we bought shares - which ended up worthless, but RR rose from the ashes...

The rotodyne my late father remembers this landing either at Westminster embankment on the old land where the festival hall is or the large platform at Westland heliport battersea there is a photo of this I have seen and I beleive it was at the heliport can any one help

Re Post 23, the B-36 in question was not nuclear powered; it carried an operative reactor for research purposes, with very heavy shielding for the crew, but the aircraft was powered by its conventional engines.

However, an eventual nuclear powered iteration of the B-70 was envisaged as opposed to its 'chemically powered' predecessor (XB-70 and eventual B-70). Alternative History can be fascinating. But it was all killed off by the XB's problems, costs, and ICBM technology.

Also, the command and control network of which the B-70 would be part was the forerunner of the Internet. But I guess you could add the beautiful but flawed XB-70 to the list engendered by this thread.

What was wrong with the Vanguard then? It was BEA's most economical airliner throughout the 60's and early 70's.