I didn't mention drag, just momentum. Consider an aeroplane sitting stationary in still air with the engine off. Now fire up the engine and some of the air in front of the aeroplane is induced ("sucked" if you will) into the engine. It also creates a big zone of low pressure in front of the aeroplane where all that air used to be (I exaggerate for effect) - lower pressure than the air behind the aeroplane. There are lots of ways you can model or look at this as a static pressure effect, a momentum effect etc, but the net result is a forward force on the airframe which is opposed by a slight net forward moment in the nozzle thrust.

PDR

Intake inertia *drag* is a different thing altogether - that's the angular moment produced by same effect as the "P-factor" people talk about loosely with propellers - the angular reaction experienced when bending the sairflow into the intake. It's one of the reasons why the Sailor-Inhaler X-32's forward intake was such a fundamentally bad idea - intake distance from the CG being one of the main governing factors for the magnitude of IID effects.

PDR

[Duplicate post due to forum software suboptimality]

PDR1
 

Your explanation sounds convincing, but is it actually true?

The air initially has zero momentum in the fore-aft direction.

The fan draws in air thereby giving it some fore-aft momentum.

It the nozzles air pointing directly downwards, the air leaving the engine has zero fore-aft momentum.

The overall change in fore-aft momentum is zero, so there will be no resultant fore-aft thrust force.

Or we could say that the fan exerts a rearwards force on the air giving it a rearward aceleration. But the rear engine casing between the rear nozzles and the nozzles themselves, exert an equal and opposite forward force, reducing the rearward air velocity to zero.

The overall fore-aft forces and acelerations sum to zero, so once again we have no fore-aft resultant force.

IIRC

The Hover Stop is fixed at 82 degrees relative to the engine centreline.

The engine centreline is set a 1.5 degrees nose up relative to the aircraft longitudinal axis.

The pitch attitude in a still air hover is 6.5 degrees nose up.

Adding the above angles together gives us 90 degrees.

Lifting the nozzle lever and moving it further aft can take the nozzles to the Nozzle Braking Stop, which is at about 100 degrees relative to the engine centre line. This can be used to slow the aircraft when approaching the hover. This may be the observed phenomena which leads to the idea that the nozzles are slightly forward in the hover.

Quite right HP, my mistake. I've now corrected it.

I used to have a good memory, but these days I can't remember where I've put it.

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