Aeronautics: The Plane That Can Fly Like a Helicopter

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The two planes that took off from the Dallas Naval Air Station last week looked like a pair of elephants doing a mid-air pas de deux. Their wings were tilted vertically, while their four turbo prop engines blasted so much prop wash straight downward that they kept pieces of trash flying in all directions around the field. Back and forth they rocked, 50 ft. above the ground, when suddenly they stopped and hovered in the 10-m.p.h. wind. Ungainly as they looked, the pair of XC-142As were the first large U.S. military transports to demonstrate a helicopter-like capability for vertical lift-offs and landings.

Other fighter-type V/STOLs have already flown, but Ling-Temco-Vought's XC-142As are full-scale troop carriers, and they are remarkably agile. LTV's Director of Flight Operations John Konrad took his plane through a series of 360° turns only 20 ft. off the ground, then flew backward and forward with equal ease. Both pilots then reached for the one cockpit control that would have been out of place in a conventional plane: the lever that controls the two powerful screwjacks that can turn the wings until they point skyward or roll them back into standard flight position (see cuts). Once their wings were flat and their propellers pointing forward, they flew past the 600 press-military-airline observers at 250 m.p.h.

Though the XC-142A's performance resembles that of a fast-flying helicopter, the resemblance ends there. It is the largest plane of its type in the world, can carry 32 combat troops or four tons of cargo. The two that were flown last week are the first of five to be delivered to the Air Force this year at a cost of more than $100 million. "With an aircraft like this," said LTV Executive Vice President Paul Thayer, as he talked of the brush-fire wars the plane might be used for, "a clearing in a forest performs like a multimillion-dollar runway."