Icons of Aviation History: The X-13 Vertijet

In the 1950s, the US military became intensely interested in “vertical take-off and landing” aircraft, dubbed VTOL. The Navy wanted to be able to pack more planes onto smaller aircraft carriers and to launch jet aircraft from the deck of a surfaced submarine, and the Air Force was looking for combat jets that didn’t need large vulnerable airbases or runways and which could operate from dispersed locations like urban parking lots.

The Ryan aircraft company, which had already developed the Fireball hybrid propeller/jet interceptor for the Navy, was already thinking about the concept. They thought they could produce a lightweight jet fighter which could be launched vertically, like a rocket, using a jet engine that was more powerful than the one used in the Fireball. By 1946, Ryan’s project caught the attention of the Navy, who wrote up a contract to research the technical issues further and if possible to construct a full-scale engineering version for testing and evaluation. 

In March 1947, Ryan had three potential designs which they presented to the Navy.  All three would be a small (23 feet in length) delta-winged aircraft that would use American-built licensed copies of the British Nene jet engine and would be steered during vertical take off and landing by “reaction control”, moving the exhaust nozzle around to redirect it to the desired position. The Navy gave the go-ahead to produce an unmanned version that would demonstrate the concept’s workability. It was known as “Model 38”. The resulting contraption looked like a bed frame wrapped around a jet engine, but when it first flew in October 1950 it did well enough to impress the Navy into funding further research.

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