Look at almost any jet airliner and the engines are in one of two places: slung under the wings, or bolted to the tail. Now look at the VFW-614. Its two engines sit on pylons on top of the wings — a layout almost no other airliner in history has ever used.

It was West Germany’s first jet airliner, and one of the most quietly radical designs of the 1970s. It was also a commercial disaster. Both facts are worth remembering.

Why put the engines on top?

It was not a gimmick. The VFW-614 was conceived as a small, tough regional jet to do the job the ageing Douglas DC-3 still did in the 1960s: fly short hops into small, sometimes rough, airfields. Mounting the two turbofans above the wings served that mission with cold German logic.

Up there, the engines were kept well clear of stones and debris thrown up from unpaved runways — a real hazard for low-slung underwing engines. The layout also avoided the structural weight penalty of hanging engines off the rear fuselage, and it let the cabin sit low to the ground so passengers and freight could be loaded without tall airstairs or special equipment. Every strange choice had a reason.

A rough start

The first of three prototypes flew on 14 July 1971 — and, unusually, that flight was also the very first time the M45H engine had ever been airborne, having skipped the usual flying test-bed stage. Then came disaster. On 1 February 1972 the first prototype, D-BABA, was lost to elevator flutter; two of the three crew survived, but the airframe was destroyed and confidence in the programme took a heavy blow.

Deliveries eventually followed. Denmark’s Cimber Air put the type into service in 1975; France’s Touraine Air Transport became the largest operator with eight; the West German Luftwaffe flew three as VIP transports until 1999. But the numbers never grew.

Beaten by the market, saved by science

Only nineteen VFW-614s were ever built. The aircraft arrived into the teeth of the 1970s oil crisis and fierce competition, Lufthansa showed little interest, the economics never worked, and production was halted in 1977. When VFW itself was wound up in 1981, the type lost its support and quietly faded from airline fleets.

Yet the story has a graceful epilogue. The German aerospace research agency DLR took one VFW-614 and rebuilt it as “ATTAS,” a flying laboratory used to test fly-by-wire controls and flight-research systems for decades, into the 2010s. The over-wing engine never caught on for airliners — though decades later the HondaJet business aircraft would revive the idea — but the VFW-614 remains a small monument to doing the unconventional thing for entirely sensible reasons.

Sources: Deutsches Museum; DLR; Wikipedia.