Up & Over

At Brown Field, near San Diego, Convair's XFY-I "Pogo Stick" last week showed what it could do in free flight. Already dress-rehearsed in a blimp hangar (TIME, June 14), the plane now fully lived up to its billing as the Navy's first vertical-take-off fighter.*

Standing nose up on its delta-wing tips and four castered wheels, the Pogo resembles an outsize badminton bird. Test Pilot Skeets Coleman started the 5,500-h.p. Allison turboprop engine, and the two counterrotating propellers slowly lifted the plane up to 175 ft. Then, still hanging on its propellers, Pogo nosed over; as it began to pick up speed, it also began to pick up lift from its stubby wings, soon was sailing along in conventional level flight. After two 280-m.p.h. sweeps over the field, Pilot Coleman raised Pogo's nose, hovered like a helicopter over his take-off spot, and came gently tail-down to earth.

With a predicted top horizontal speed of over 500 m.p.h., the XFY-I is designed to give close Navy air cover to cargo ships, taking off and landing on a freighter's deck even in rough weather.

Less happy was a second Convair-Navy demonstration. As observers watched, Test Pilot Charles E. Richbourg taxied the experimental XF2-YI Sea Dart (TIME, Feb. 16, 1953) across San Diego Bay on its retractable "hydro-skis." The jet seaplane took off, circled the bay, screamed in for a 400-m.p.h. pass at the shore. Suddenly, 300 ft. above the water, the Sea Dart fell apart in a gush of flame and a shower of metal fragments. Pilot Richbourg lived only two minutes after rescuers pulled him from the bay.

Until the Sea Dart's scattered remains are brought up and studied, no one is able to guess why it exploded.

*A similar Navy fighter, Lockheed's XFV-1, is designed to take off horizontally as well as vertically, has yet to complete its tests.

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