The aircraft sits on its tail in the hangar. The pilot climbs a ladder, then climbs another, until he is sitting almost flat on his back, looking straight up at the hangar ceiling. He starts two contra-rotating turboprops driving 16-foot propellers. He releases the brakes. The Convair XFY-1 Pogo lifts straight up, like a model rocket, accelerates to 250 knots, transitions to horizontal flight, and roars off across the California desert.

Then he has to land it. By looking backwards over his shoulder. While the aircraft hovers vertically and falls, very slowly, towards the ground. Most pilots could not do it. James F. “Skeets” Coleman, the only test pilot to make a complete vertical-to-horizontal-to-vertical-to-landing flight, said afterwards: “I would not recommend that anyone else attempt this.”

A Fighter for Every Ship

The US Navy’s pitch in 1950 was simple. Suppose every destroyer, frigate, and supply ship had its own fighter — not catapult-launched, not on a deck, but stored vertically in a small hangar and flown straight up off a steel mat. The fleet would have air cover everywhere, all the time. The size of the aircraft carrier fleet would, in theory, no longer matter.

To make this work, somebody had to build a fighter that could take off and land vertically from a small platform. Convair and Lockheed both got contracts. Convair’s answer was the XFY-1 Pogo: delta-wing, contra-rotating propellers, 16,000 horsepower in an airframe weighing 7,500 pounds.

Vertical Was the Easy Part

Coleman made the first tethered hovers inside Moffett Field’s giant Hangar One in April 1954. Free flight followed. Vertical takeoff was, surprisingly, manageable. Transition to horizontal flight was smooth. The aircraft handled like a brick once it was on its side, but it flew.

The problem was landing. To land, the pilot had to slow to a hover, transition the nose from horizontal to vertical, and descend tail-first. Looking forward, he saw nothing but sky. Looking down, he saw the cockpit floor. The only way to see the ground was to look back over his shoulder, while flying a heavy turboprop precisely on its propeller-thrust as it sank toward earth at one or two knots.

“You had to learn to fly the aircraft using only your peripheral vision and the instruments behind you,” Coleman recalled. “There is no aircraft in the world that flies that way. There never will be. It was the most uncomfortable thing I have ever done in an airplane.”

The Day Jets Won

While Convair was wrestling with the Pogo’s landing problem, conventional jet fighters were getting faster, longer-ranged, and more capable. By 1955 the F-9F Panther was already obsolete. The Pogo’s top speed was 380 knots — slower than a Korean-War MiG-15. Its payload was negligible. And it required a unique, expensive pilot training pipeline that no fleet could afford.

The Navy cancelled the programme on 1 August 1955. The aircraft Coleman flew is now in the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, in Virginia, sitting on its tail exactly as it was always meant to.

The Idea Refuses to Die

VTOL fighters did not go away. The British eventually solved the problem with the Hawker Harrier — vectored thrust nozzles, conventional cockpit. The Russians tried with the Yak-38. America has the F-35B, with its lift fan. None of these aircraft, however, are tail-sitters. The XFY-1 Pogo is the only aircraft in aviation history that took off from a vertical position by sitting on its propellers, and the only fighter that ever made the full transition from vertical to horizontal flight and back. It worked. Just barely. Once.

Sources: National Air and Space Museum, Convair type history, J.F. Coleman test reports.