The now-defunct Lockheed Martin VH-71 was supposed to be the presidential helicopter, but its mission failed miserably. After the Pentagon canceled the program, President Barack Obama described the problem saying it’s an “example of the procurement process gone amok.”
Translated: The $3.3 billion project was way too expensive. An affordable program took its place to provide the Marine One presidential helicopter. Incidentally, Marine One had always been a Sikorsky aircraft, until the contract with Lockheed.
Yakovlev Yak-38
The Harrier supersonic jet is a military feat of the invention that hit the blueprints of American and European aircraft manufacturers in the 1950s, shortly after the Korean War. The goal to produce a jet fighter that could navigate as precisely as a helicopter using jet boosters for vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) was achieved by 1969. Harriers were first used in combat during the Vietnam War.
The Russian version of the Harrier took its first VTOL flight in 1971. The supersonic jet could graze a Mach 1 speed, but the Soviet version proved impractical for military purposes. Its voracious jets consumed so much fuel that the Yak-38 was limited to a 200-mile range. It had no radar, making the aircraft a weak defense fighter. Hardly armed, its air-to-air defense was limited to small missiles with a range of only 5 miles and a couple of cannon pods. The Yak-38 went out of production by 1991.
The Sikorsky S-76
A bad track record has not prevented this helicopter from being a very common aircraft that is often used for business. In fact, the Sikorsky S-76 is the very helicopter that went down, killing Kobe Bryant and eight others. While mechanical failure is not attributed to the crash, some point out that the S-76 was not equipped with a crash-detecting system called a Terrain Awareness and Warning System.
In 2002, a mechanical failure smashed a Sikorsky S-76 into the North Sea, killing five and leaving six stranded at sea. Another fatal accident happened in 2005 when the helicopter crashed into the Baltic Sea just short of Tallinn, Estonia. This time it was the S-76’s main rotor forward actuator that was responsible for killing all 14 people on board. Again, in 2015, a Sikorsky S-76 crashed into a tree in Indonesia on March 21. The crew and four passengers survived. The cause of the crash was a mechanical failure involving the main rotor servo push rod connection.
The Bell X-1
This supersonic aircraft, built way back in the Forties, could really scoot! The experimental rocket plane topped out at 1,000 mph, becoming the first manned supersonic flight. On October 14, 1947, a sonic boom exploded over the skies of the Mojave Desert when the Bell X-1, piloted by Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager, hit Mach 1.06, breaking the sound barrier. The flight-inspired jet fighter movies like The Right Stuff.
The experimental aircraft was designed to withstand 18x the force of gravity. A set of four rockets provided an engine that blasted out 6,000 lbs. of thrust for extreme acceleration. The Bell X-1 does not take off like regular planes, it was put into flight by dropping from the belly of a Boeing B-29 mother ship. It came together as a joint project between the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and the U.S. Army and Air Forces. Bell Aircraft built the project that proved aircraft could fly faster than the speed of sound. It was initially conceived in 1944.
The Aerodrome A
Noted physicist Samuel Pierpont Langley tried his hand at aeronautics around the close of the 19th Century. He achieved the first unmanned flight of a heavier-than-air vessel on May 6, 1896, with his Aerodrome Number 5. It flew 3,300 feet at 25 mph.
With that success, the U.S. military fronted Langley $50,000 in 1898 to build a manned aircraft. He set to work on the Aerodrome A, what he called a “human-carrying” airplane, but the project was ill-fated. He tried to scale up the unmanned models to human-carrying size. It was an aerodynamically impossible design and both of his attempts crashed upon takeoff in 1903. The Wright brothers won that race in December of that same year, nine days after Langley’s last try. However, the engine Langley designed was a 52.4 horsepower powerplant which was impressive and unheard of at the time.