US Navy Lockheed/Ryan SV-14 Pelican

[CammNut]

The pitching deck of the destroyer came into view as the Pelican broke through the low cloud deck, a roiling grey sea filling the pilots' view. As the wipers worked to keep the large windshields clear, the copilot double-checked that the gas generators were at full throttle, driving the lift fans to their maximum vertical thrust as the pilot brought the cruise engines back to idle and the aircraft slowed to a uneasy hover above the wave-washed flightdeck.

With landing-beacon crosshairs on the pilot's flight director showing the aircraft was in position, he eased back on the gas-generator throttles, beginning a slow descent toward the deck. As the pilot fought the turbulence to keep the aircraft level, movements of his stick now commanded a complex mix of vane angle on the lift fans and thrust from reaction control jets on the tail. Thankfully the Pelican's unusual circular wing was fairly insensitive to gusts.

Braving the sweeping spray, the destroyer's crew grappled a cable lowered from the aircraft and secured it to the flightdeck's beartrap haul-down device, which guided the Pelican on its final descent onto the pitching metal deck, which rose to meet the landing gear with a crash of overcompressed oleos.
...

In the early 1970s, the U.S. Navy wanted to boost its ability to defend against a growing Soviet submarine threat by basing fixed-wing anti-submarine warfare aircraft on the then-planned Sea Control Ship (SCS). The need was for something with more speed, range and firepower than the ASW helicopters with which the SCS was originally planned to be equipped.

At the time, the Rockwell XFV-12A supersonic fighter was under development to protect the SCS, which was a small V/STOL-only aircraft carrier. Ryan Aeronautical had built and flown the XV-5 Vertifan fan-in-wing V/STOL experimental aircraft in the mid-1960s. When the Navy's VSV requirement for a V/STOL ASW aircraft emerged, it teamed with Lockheed to bid.

Lockheed, with LTV, had just won the Navy's VSX competition for a carrier-based ASW aircraft and was developing the S-3 Viking. Together, Lockheed and Ryan proposed a fan-in-wing V/STOL ASW aircraft based on the Viking and using many of the same sensors and systems. In 1972, the Lockheed/Ryan team won the contract to develop what would become the SV-14 Pelican.

For vertical flight, the Pelican had two large fans embedded in the wing to provide lift for VTOL and a smaller fan in the nose to provide lift for balance and control. The fans were tip-driven by exhaust gases ducted from two turbine engines housed in the roots of the unusual circular wing, which was chosen to avoid the need for wing folding while on the SCS.

To take off, large doors on top of the wing opened while louvres deployed below the wing and nose fans. These vanes deflected to vector the fan thrust to provide control in vertical flight. The slow response of the fans to thrust commands had made flight control in hover difficult on the XV-5, so the Pelican had additional Harrier-style puffer jets on the tail.

After takeoff, to transition to wingborne cruise flight, the rear-mounted TF34 turbofans provided forward thrust to accelerate the aircraft as the fans were spooled down, doors and louvres closed and internal gas generators shut down. The Pelican then flew like a conventional jet-powered fixed-wing aircraft, with more speed, range and payload than a helicopter.

The Pelican was designed to be able land on any air-capable warship to refuel and rearm. So, with the sailors on such ships likely to be unfamiliar with jet aircraft, the intakes for the gas generators were fitted with FOD screens to prevent the ingestion of any foreign objects left on the ship's flightdeck.

This ability to operate from cruisers and destroyers saved the SV-14 when the Navy cancelled the Sea Control Ships. Instead, the Pelicans were based on large-deck aircraft carriers and forward-deployed to warship flightdecks to extend the reach of anti-submarine patrols protecting the battlegroup.

So, in what-if modelling terms, what this all means is that when you combine this:



With this:



You get this:





Starting with an Airfix 1/72 S-3 kit, I cut off the wing roots and filled the resulting saddle-shaped hole. I cut off the nose and replaced it with the longer nose cut from the Ultraman Arrow 2 kit. I shortened the vertical tail, moved the horizontal tail to the top of the fin and relocated the engines from under the wing to either side of the tail. I cut off and glued the Arrow wings to the Viking fuselage.



The lift-fan doors are moulded into the upper and lower wing surfaces on the Arrow kit, so I cut those out. I cut the upper ones in half to make the doors and sliced the lower ones into strips to make the vanes. I carefully made the wing fans out of plastic card. I drilled holes in the nose and used a piece of plastic tube as the fan duct and a pair of F-16 engine faces as the fan.



The bird-slicer intakes of the Arrow kit forced me to come up with the idea of the FOD screens and the puffer-jet idea was just a way to fill the hole in the tail on the S-3 kit for the extending MAD boom. The resulting aircraft was a resolute tailsitter, but I was able to simply move the main landing gear from the front to the back of the gear bays and, hey presto, it sat perfectly.





Colours and markings are from the Airfix Viking kit and various other S-3 decal sheets. I ham-fistedly cocked up the original decaling and put the model aside for several months, only returning to finish it up last weekend – when I discovered I had put the stars and bars on the wrong sides! Ham-fisted indeed.

 

[philp]

OK, that is fun and a very nice job.

[kerick]

Where in the world did you find that Arrow kit? Awesome whiff!

[Dizzyfugu]

That's VERY cool! 

[Old Wombat]

Surprisingly neat & it looks good, too!

[Wardukw]

Great wiffy and a very cool idea 

[PR19_Kit]

OUTSTANDING! 

What a cracking idea, and as Kerick says 'Where DID you find the Arrow kit?' I've never even heard of it before, but it's a great source for the wing fans etc.

[kitbasher]

Excellent - real Gerry Anderson stuff there, I can see it in an episode of Thunderbirds.

[McColm]

Well done 

[ericr]

beautiful idea 

[zenrat]

Fabulous.  I wish i'd made it.

[Tophe]

  wow! gorgeous!

EDIT: as I don't read Japanese fluently, I have been happy to find (thanks to Google) the Arrow 2 presented at https://www.1999.co.jp/eng/10526695

[Gondor]

Wonderful 

Gondor

[Old Wombat]

Thanks, Tophe!

As a result of that link my "Impressed" rating just went up significantly, realising that you had to cut out the vertical lift vents & scratch-build the interiors (OK, so I didn't read the narrative very thoroughly! I was busy being impressed by the pictures! )

[NARSES2]

That really has come out well, and looks so much of the period as well