Every fighter jet has the same fatal dependency: a long strip of concrete. Destroy the runway and the aircraft is a very expensive ornament. In the early 1950s, with NATO planners assuming their handful of airfields in Germany would be atomised in the opening hours of a war, this was not an abstract problem.

The French answer was to build a fighter with no landing gear at all.

The SNCASE SE.5000 Baroudeur took off from a wheeled trolley that it dropped on unstick, and landed on three skids. It could operate from grass, ploughed fields, sand, mud, snow and frozen lakes. It flew supersonic in a dive. It never entered service.

The idea, and where it came from

The Baroudeur was not built to a government specification. It was the personal project of Georges Héreil, president of SNCASE, who in 1951 decided to spend his own company’s money on two prototypes after licence-building de Havilland Vampires and Mistrals had restored the firm’s finances.

To design it he hired Wsiewołod Jakimiuk, a Polish engineer who had been chief designer at PZL before the war and then at de Havilland Canada, where he had created the Chipmunk. Jakimiuk had already been thinking about jettisonable undercarriages. He was installed at SNCASE’s plant at La Courneuve, north of Paris, and reportedly greeted his new team over the top of his glasses with the line that he had decided to increase their workload.

The precedent was German. The Messerschmitt Me 163 and early Arado Ar 234 had both used take-off dollies and landing skids. Both had also demonstrated the flaw in the idea: once down, the aircraft was stuck where it stopped, immobile and helpless. Solving that was the whole point of the Baroudeur.

Getting off the ground

The original plan was a catapult. That was dropped as too expensive, and the trolley took its place: a welded steel tricycle carriage weighing about 1.3 tonnes, with two big low-pressure main wheels under the aircraft’s centre of gravity and a twin nose wheel borrowed, in design terms, from the Caravelle.

The aircraft sat on it, held by a retractable peg engaging a standard bomb hook. At around 225 km/h the pilot released it; a fork rose to push the nose clear. The trolley then braked itself automatically and streamed a parachute, and could be recovered and reused. If the ground was bad, JATO rockets could be fitted — to the trolley, or to the aircraft.

Getting to that point took a great deal of very unglamorous testing. From May 1952 trolleys were fired down the field at Persan-Beaumont at increasing weights, first towed by tractor, then rocket-propelled. Then came a full-scale ballasted mock-up reproducing the aircraft’s masses and inertias, with a pilot sitting inside, driven by solid-propellant rockets.

On 23 April 1953, with Maulandi in the cabin, the first separation attempt went badly wrong: the trolley overturned and threw the cabin clear. Maulandi later wrote that he fell about ten metres, and recorded his own reaction at the time as an unprintable observation about what a stupid game this was. He got away with concussion and bruising.

Period film of the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet — the trolley-and-skid formula the Baroudeur inherited, and improved on.

Coming back down

Landing used three skids: two retractable main skids in the lower forward fuselage and a tail skid under the jet pipe. They were cast in magnesium alloy with interchangeable steel wear shoes and a plastic insulating layer between the two — magnesium being famously willing to burn. Rubber blocks working in torsion and compression let them pivot, and the resulting variable track actually helped keep the aircraft straight.

At the rear of the main skids were claws. They dug into the surface, and the pilot used them both to brake and to steer. Two ventral strakes under the rear fuselage improved sideslip stability and gave extra ground contact. With the fuselage riding twenty centimetres off the ground, a landing felt much like a controlled belly landing.

Crucially, the aircraft could then move. It taxied on its skids under jet thrust — enough to reposition in front of its trolley, or to shove itself under a tree out of sight of reconnaissance aircraft. A Jeep with a winch pulled it back aboard the trolley in a matter of minutes.

The demonstrations were extraordinary. Grass. Ploughed and unploughed fields. A peat bog in Touraine. Snow. Frozen lakes. Roads. And the beach at La Baule, where Maulandi’s flight-test order defined the runway as running from opposite the Hôtel Morgane to the line of the avenue du Général de Gaulle. He nearly got caught by the incoming tide and escaped by taking off in a curve with one trolley wheel practically in the Atlantic.

Mach 1, and a cracked spar

The first prototype, F-ZWSB, flew from Istres on 1 August 1953. The second followed on 12 May 1954, and on 17 July that year Maulandi took it past Mach 1 in a shallow dive. The only available proof was a sonic boom audible on the ground, which took several attempts to land in the right place — on one occasion it arrived over Port-de-Bouc instead of the Istres radio car.

He also went supersonic once with the skids extended, by mistake, and only noticed afterwards. The skids, he concluded, barely disturbed the aircraft at all.

Then, in late 1954, an inspector at Toulouse refused to sign off prototype 01, insisting he could see cracks nobody else could. He was right. The machined zicral wing-root fittings were riddled with cracks joining the drilled holes; the second aircraft was worse. A demonstration cut through an ingot of the same alloy ended with a bang as the billet split open under its own locked-in residual stress. The parts were remade in steel and the programme continued — after the Marignane plant director had ended an argument by observing that one could not reasonably ask this boy to fly a machine when nobody was certain the wings would stay on.

The competition it could not win

NATO issued Basic Military Requirement 1 in December 1953 — a common lightweight tactical strike fighter — four months after the Baroudeur had already flown. The Baroudeur had not been designed for it, and did not fit it: the specification wanted an aircraft of around 4,700 kg maximum weight, and the Baroudeur was roughly double that.

It got into the evaluation anyway, because SNECMA insisted that the Atar 101 be admitted alongside the Bristol Orpheus. Two SE.5003s went to Brétigny-sur-Orge for the flying trials in September and October 1957, alongside the Fiat G.91, the Breguet Taon, the Dassault Étendard VI, the Aerfer Sagittario 2 and the Northrop N-156.

The Fiat G.91 — the aircraft that won NBMR-1 and equipped several NATO air forces for decades.

The G.91 was confirmed as the winner in January 1958. The Baroudeur programme stopped. Maulandi’s own diagnosis was blunter than any official report.

A senior French officer is supposed to have looked at it and said what a pity it was that the machine had no wheels. Maulandi’s answer was that with wheels it would have been bigger, heavier and more expensive — and then it would not have been a Baroudeur.

The problem the Baroudeur was built to solve, seventy years on: Swedish Gripens operating from public roads under the dispersed-basing doctrine.

Shot to pieces, and rebuilt

All five airframes were sent to the gunnery range at Cazaux and used as targets. The trolleys were abandoned at Istres.

In early 1979 the association Les Ailes Anciennes, based at Dugny beside the Musée de l’Air workshops, went and collected the wreckage — riddled with holes from 7.65 mm up to 30 mm. From the rear fuselage of one prototype, the nose and right wing of one SE.5003, the left wing of another and most of the third, they built one aircraft. It appeared on its restored trolley at Le Bourget in June 1999, where Maulandi came to see it. It is still there, in the association’s reserves, still being worked on.

Nobody was ever killed flying it. Maulandi noted that himself, with some satisfaction, including the words “not even me.”

And the underlying problem it was built to solve has never gone away. Every few years somebody rediscovers that runways are the most fragile part of an air force, and starts talking about dispersed operations, austere strips and highway landings. The Swedes built a whole doctrine on it. The Baroudeur got there first, and answered the question in the most literal way anyone has ever tried: take the wheels off.

Sources: Pierre “Tito” Maulandi, “Le S.E. 5000 Baroudeur — réflexions sur un avion fossile par son pilote”, also published in Le Fana de l’Aviation n°407 (2003); Les Ailes Anciennes Le Bourget; aviationsmilitaires.net; English and French Wikipedia; Wikimedia Commons.