It had no tail. It squatted on its undercarriage like a startled bird. It was named after a flying reptile, and in the buttoned-up world of 1930s British aviation it looked like a practical joke. The Westland-Hill Pterodactyl was none of those things. It was a deadly serious attempt to solve the problem that was killing more pilots than the enemy: the stall and the spin.

That it ended up as a tailless fighter with a rear gunner who could shoot in almost any direction was simply where the logic led.

A safety idea, not a stunt

Geoffrey Hill had flown in the Royal Flying Corps in the Great War, and he had watched too many friends die not in combat but in the spin — that vicious, often unrecoverable corkscrew that followed an unintended stall. Hill became convinced that a tailless aircraft, with swept wings and controllers at the tips, could be made inherently resistant to stalling and spinning. Fly it badly, and it would simply refuse to bite.

Through the late 1920s and early 1930s, working with Westland, he built a series of these tailless machines and steadily refined the idea. They were strange to look at and stranger to explain, but they flew — and they flew safely, which was precisely the point.

The tailless fighter

The idea reached its sharpest form in the Pterodactyl Mk V of 1934, a two-seat fighter built to an Air Ministry specification. It carried a 600-horsepower Rolls-Royce Goshawk driving a propeller at the front, and a small lower wing that made it, technically, a sesquiplane. And because there was no tail to get in the way, its rear gunner enjoyed a field of fire that a conventional fighter simply could not match — he could swing his guns through arcs that on any normal aircraft would have meant shooting off your own tailplane.

On the numbers, it was no embarrassment. Its performance was reckoned to rival the conventional Hawker Hart, one of the standard combat aircraft of the day. Hill even envisaged mixed formations of front-firing and rear-firing Pterodactyls covering each other’s blind spots — a genuinely original tactical idea.

Why it never flew in anger

And yet the Pterodactyl was never ordered into production. The Royal Air Force of the 1930s was conservative, the conventional designs were good enough and far better understood, and a tailless fighter — however clever — was a risk no one in authority wanted to take. The programme was wound up.

But the idea did not die. Hill’s tailless experiments fed into a stream of thinking that would, decades later, surface in the flying wings of the jet age — right up to the stealth bombers of today. The Pterodactyl looked like a curiosity. It was actually an early, serious draft of an idea the rest of aviation would take half a century to catch up with.

Sources: Wikipedia (Westland-Hill Pterodactyl); Military Matters; Aviastar; Royal Aeronautical Society