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the British Transport Aircraft Requirements Committee, or TARC, issued a design study ‘Outline Requirement’ in 1969 for a short-haul aircraft to be developed by a British aviation company.
The brief was for a 100-seat airliner with a minimum range of 450 miles or 725 km.
That would be range enough for flights like Glasgow to London or from London to cities like Dublin, Paris and Brussels, but not for cities like Rome and Berlin. So, short-range indeed.
The Hawker Siddeley threw their hat into the ring with jetliner called the HS.141 that had a radical new feature - it could take off vertically!
A central and unique facet of the ‘Outline Requirement’ issued by TARC in 1969 was that the aircraft had to be an S/VTOL airliner.
A vertical and/or short take-off and landing, or V/STOL aircraft, is a plane that can take-off or land vertically or do so on very short runways. Therefore, it’s obvious that a V/STOL aircraft has to be able to hover.
A subset of this unique class of aircraft is the vertical take-off and landing, or VTOL aircraft, that doesn’t require a runway at all.
the military had been especially keen on V/STOL technology in the post-war era since they could be fast jets operated from clearings in forests, very short runways or even small aircraft carriers,
unlike other military jets that required longer runways and clearance for lift-off.
Furthermore, V/STOL could go farther and use less fuel than most helicopters.
or civilian or commercial aviation, V/STOL airliners were known to cost more per flight than a conventional airliner.
However, these costs were offset by a V/STOL aircraft’s greater convenience and productivity.
Critically, they were also considered a lot safer, in that fan-lift engines could provide adequate control even in the event of failure of the aircraft’s main engines.
In fact, V/STOL aircraft were considered ten times safer than the standard provided by the UK’s Air Registration Board at the time.
It’s worth noting that only aeroplanes that achieve lift in forward flight by planing the air can be classified as V/STOL aircraft.
That means that helicopters are actually not considered to be V/STOL or even VTOL aircraft since they do not achieve forward motion in the same way.
It’s further worth noting that most V/STOL aircraft designs were abject failures from the 1950s into the 1970s.
he very few success stories were military aircraft, including the British Harrier Jump Jet, released in 1969 and developed by Hawker-Siddeley.
Another successful V/STOL military aircraft at that time was the Soviet Union’s Yak-38 Forger, released in 1971.
So, why was the British transport authority so insistent on it being a V/STOL aircraft? The reasoning was that a steep approach and departure profile would attain two things for air traffic in London at the time: 1. a reduction in noise in what was a heavily built-up and major metropolitan area 2. it would mean not having to build a third major airport in the London area. And so a V/STOL aircraft it had to be.
the project was done under the auspices of Hawker Siddeley’s Research & Future Projects Department at Hatfield in Hertfordshire, England.
The design team investigated various configurations of the aircraft, as well as different power plant and control systems.
It submitted a draft design to TARC in January 1970, mere months after the brief had first gone out.
Official details of the newly named HS.141 project were first issued by Hawker Siddeley at the German Aviation Show in Hanover in March 1970.
The HS.141 design had the following design characteristics: it was to be an all-metal construction with a T-tail and low-mounted swept wing with a quarter-chord sweep-back set at 28 degrees. It would be 29 feet and 10 inches or 9.09 metres in height and 120 feet or 36.63 metres in length,
which meant it would be similar in size to smaller commercial planes of that time, such as the Boeing 367-80, the Convair 880, the Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation and the Tupolev Tu-134.
By comparison, that length would have made the HS.141 about 44% of the length of the contemporary Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 models.
Its wingspan was 75 feet or 22.86 metres, with a wing area of 1,060 square feet or 98 square metres. Its empty weight would be 110,300 pounds or just over 50,000 kilograms and 134,200 pounds or 60,872 kilograms and maximum take-off weight.
Inside, the plane was conventional, with a passenger cabin with rows of five or six seats each. It was slated to have a capacity of 102 to 119 passengers, depending on seat configuration.
Of course, you are likely wondering how on earth it took off right into the sky.