--- title: "Convair XFY-1 Pogo: The Navy's Weirdest Plane" description: "In the 1900s, humanity learned to fly. In the 1910s, humanity learned to fly *well*. In the twenties, people transitioned from aviation's wood age to the metal age, and in the thirties, the power of flight was spread to the masses for the first time. In the 1940s, the jet engine arrived on the scene, with the promise and potential to change everything. But by the 1950s, one critical tool still eluded the aviators of the world: VTOL.\n\nVertical takeoff and landing wasn't entirely a secret; the world's first helicopter had flown just two weeks after the start of World War II. But until the power to take off and land without a runway could be combined with the power to fly like the best aircraft of the time, aviation still left something to be desired. And with a Cold War now underway, nobody could afford a second-place trophy in the VTOL race.\n\nFor the US Navy, the VTOL problem was solved by the Pogo. One part helicopter, one part high-performance fighter plane, and about ten parts crazy, the Pogo is among the most hare-brained prototypes in aviation history. And it very nearly worked.\n\n## The Issue at Hand\n\nIt's worth understanding just why VTOL mattered so much, because that's what explains why the United States was willing to go to such ridiculous lengths to get the technology. VTOL had been on the wish-list for the Allied forces since the end of the Second World War, largely because of the advantages it offered in getting ground troops to places where they weren't expected.\n\nIf the US could, say, lure a few thousand enemy troops into a massive battle at a fixed location, and then safely deposit several hundred soldiers in their back lines, that battle would be over before it ever really started. Troops could land away from the front lines, carry out operations, and then leave with minimal casualties, just flying back to where they'd come from. And constructing runways was one of the most time-consuming, tedious, and strategically costly things you could do in the wars of the mid-20th century. If troops at forward positions could be supplied, reinforced, and given air support without having to build a runway, they were at a massive advantage.\n\nHelicopters were slower, had a worse time protecting themselves, and offered less versatility, especially in the post-war years. But they were good enough to do the job until technology was ready to make VTOL aircraft happen at their own pace. Or, helicopters were good enough most of the time, with one key exception.\n\nAcross all of World War II, there were few lessons more important than this: when it came to operations at sea, the presence of aerial assets was the difference between life and death. Ships that could operate within range of an aircraft carrier usually had it pretty good, while those that didn't found themselves in more trouble, more frequently. Germany and Japan had been caught somewhat off-guard by how effectively the Allies used their air power, but the Soviets knew precisely what the playbook was. If the two superpowers ever found themselves at war, the Soviets would understand that by America's own logic, any US ship without aircraft coverage was basically a sitting duck.\n\n## Project Hummingbird\n\nBy 1947, as the first jet-powered aircraft were still puttering across the skies above Europe and North America, America's Navy was already looking into a new take on the VTOL design. Designated Project Hummingbird, the initiative used captured intelligence and material from a World War II-era German test program, in collaboration with the US Army.\n\nUnlike the aircraft the Army was considering around the same time, the Navy's design was meant to be a light aircraft, a fighter if possible. It needed no runway space and could park in ones or threes or fives on the decks of a wide range of ships. Its profile would ideally be small enough that it wouldn't interfere too badly with day-to-day ship operations. And in a crisis, these planes weren't intended to win major battles all by themselves. Instead, they would be a delay tactic, buying precious minutes to slow down an enemy air attack before help could arrive from someplace else, or otherwise doing their best to ward off enemy planes before those planes inevitably ran low on fuel and had to turn back.\n\nAt other times, they could conduct reconnaissance, scouting for submarines on the sea or scoping out targets in advance of small-scale raids. Even in small numbers, such an aircraft could contribute massively to the situational awareness and survivability of non-carrier naval task forces, merchant convoys, and even individual ships working far from support.\n\nIn 1951, two companies were awarded contracts and asked to design and construct an X-plane, a proof-of-concept aircraft that would form the basis for later production designs. Those two companies, Lockheed and Convair, were each supposed to build two X-plane copies. But in an indicator of just how difficult this task would prove to be, neither would ultimately produce a second copy of their design.\n\nLockheed's design was designated the XFV, sometimes referred to as the Salmon, and, spoiler alert, it never completed a vertical takeoff and landing sequence and was unable to fly horizontally. Convair, however, got better resources from the program and had a bit more success overall. Convair would produce the XFY, a bumbling little aircraft that would, in time, show why it deserved the bouncy little nickname it ultimately received: Pogo.\n\n## The Pogo: An Odd Little Duck\n\nJust at first glance, it should be clear that the Pogo was an odd little duck, largely owing to the strangeness of its wing design. The Pogo was a propeller plane, not a jet like the ones becoming popular in both the American and Soviet arsenals, but it boasted a set of triangular delta wings. Those were not the sort of thing one would expect to find on a propeller aircraft of any kind, certainly not one this small.\n\nYet the delta wings weren't even the strangest thing about it. That would be its lower fin. Most propeller aircraft have a tailfin, standing upright at the back of the plane, but the Pogo had a second, mirror-image tailfin, this one pointing downward. The fins were a lot bigger in proportion to the body than a normal tailfin, sort of crammed up toward the cockpit in a somewhat claustrophobic configuration. At rest, the Pogo would perch upright, sitting on the trailing edges of its two wings and two fins, balanced on a little wheel at each tip. Those wheels were supported on several-foot-long struts meant to compress inward by several feet when they landed, in a move reminiscent of the pogo stick that gave the aircraft its name.\n\nAnd the downward-pointing tailfin wasn't the only oddity onboard. Powered by an Allison XT40-A-14 turboprop engine, and designed to eventually incorporate a more powerful engine called the Allison T54, the Pogo used two propellers, both mounted on its nose, instead of just one. The two propellers were contra-rotating, which is to say that one rotated clockwise and the other counterclockwise, in a design that's somewhat more energy-efficient than a regular propeller. Its awful capacity to generate noise, its added weight to the front of a plane, and its mechanical complexity have generally made such a design uninteresting for aeronautical engineers. Contra-rotating propellers can be found on late variants of the British Supermarine Spitfire and the Soviet Tupolev Tu-95, but mostly they're a feature of various prototypes throughout time, with the occasional production aircraft usually not making it past a couple hundred copies.\n\n## What the Pogo Could Do\n\nIn terms of what the craft was actually capable of, it's rather difficult to say, since it never progressed to the level of testing that would have generated clear answers on those specs. Sitting empty, it weighed a bit over 5,000 kilograms, or 11,155 pounds, with an expected service ceiling of 37,533 feet, or 11,500 meters. It was expected to boast an impressive rate of climb and a top speed that, while still below the speed of sound, was expected to be somewhere in the four-to-five-hundred mile per hour range.\n\nIt was a single-seater, measuring just 31 feet long, with its delta wings 26 feet wide. While the prototype was never fitted with armament, the Navy did have a fairly good idea of what they wanted onboard. At the time of early testing, the plan was to configure it with either a total of forty-eight unguided aerial rockets, or four 20-millimeter cannons, two each mounted on the tips of the horizontal-plane wings.\n\nThe cockpit was specially built for the aircraft's flight style, with a rotating chair that could sit at about a forty-five degree angle when the plane was perched on its wingtips, and rotate to a regular, front-facing orientation when in flight. The cockpit was also equipped with a rope, so the pilot could get out safely in case of an emergency vertical landing away from the testing field. Finally, the lower tailfin was built to be jettisoned in the event the craft had to make an emergency horizontal landing, although whether it had a set of horizontal landing gear is less clear.\n\n## The First Flights\n\nThe Pogo's first flight took place on April 29, 1954, with test pilot and Marine reservist James Coleman, better known on the airfield as \"Skeets,\" behind the stick. On that day, the Pogo was rigged up to safety lines, for a test flight that was very much the first of its kind. No American aircraft of similar size or engine power had ever attempted a vertical takeoff and landing, so in case something went haywire, a tether in the nose was ready to hoist the aircraft off the ground before it could take a little hop and crash catastrophically. Each wingtip was kept steady by another line, in the Navy's best attempts to keep the whole apparatus steady.\n\nThe Pogo's tethered tests would go on for months. Skeets logged over sixty hours of flight time under those conditions, while those inside the hangar battled the incredible airflow that a downward-pulling, contra-rotating propeller system would generate. Several times, the tethering mechanism was the only thing that stopped the Pogo from falling onto its side. But by the end of that summer in 1954, the plane was deemed ready to move outside.\n\nOn the first try, August 1, the Pogo lifted twenty feet from the ground, a little over half its length, or about six meters. On the second try, it rose to 150 feet, 45 meters. For the next three months, Skeets and his team performed another seventy flights of that same kind, taking off, hovering for a bit, and landing, before the moment of truth finally came on November 2 of that same year. On that day, the Pogo lifted straight up from the ground before transitioning into horizontal flight, flying for twenty-one minutes, hovering a bit longer, and setting back down on the ground. In subsequent flights, Skeets would take the Pogo to heights of over 3,000 meters, or ten thousand feet.\n\n## Impressive Feats, Glaring Flaws\n\nEven with limited experiences like these, the Navy started to realize that the Pogo was capable of some pretty impressive feats. Even with its throttle set for minimum power, the plane was flying well past 300 miles per hour, around 500 kilometers per hour. In fact, because of the lack of speed brakes or spoilers on the airframe, the Pogo often outran the chase aircraft that were supposed to be monitoring it. The plane was able to transition to horizontal flight just fifty feet, 15 meters, above the ground, an exceptional feat that later jet-powered VTOL aircraft would take decades to match.\n\nSkeets worked out a mechanism to land the plane upright: approaching the spot where he wanted to land by flying horizontally low to the ground, then pitching straight up, cutting engine power, and letting the plane lose airspeed until it was hanging in midair. Then he'd fire the engines and stop at just the right moment to hover, and gradually cut the power until the plane was ready to land.\n\nBut these test flights also revealed myriad issues with the Pogo's design, not least its inability to control its trajectory at low speeds. This was an issue in horizontal flight, but it got much worse when hovering, where the aircraft was not stable in the least, and constantly had to be course-corrected in midair to guide itself down. The problem only got bigger when the plane came close to the ground, with Skeets forced to fight the controls because of the immense backwash of his propellers, and the way the compressed air interacted with both his plane and the ground. Skeets boasted a 100% success rate in getting the aircraft down, but he was a very talented test pilot who had spent a whole lot of time getting every element of the Pogo's controls memorized perfectly.\n\nAnd even for Skeets, the Pogo's instability while in a hovering descent was just one of a wide range of problems. Because of the way the cockpit was oriented, landing involved looking almost directly up at the sky, where there were no reference points to measure the rate of descent. A small radar altimeter was provided to help, with a green-yellow-red lighting system to indicate when the aircraft was in a stable hover with a safe rate of descent (green and yellow), or moving toward the ground at an unsafe rate of over ten feet per second (red). Even then, a large part of his landings consisted of trying to look over his shoulder to gauge his rate of approach to the ground below. Making matters worse, the ejection seat on the Pogo was widely considered unreliable, to the point where hangar technicians eventually decided to disarm it. Skeets never once closed his canopy while flying the Pogo, always preferring to leave it open in case he had to manually heave himself out to avert an emergency.\n\nOther practical issues proved no easier to deal with. Because the Pogo landed on tiny little wheels at the four tips of its wings and fins, there was no real way to build a mechanism that could brake those wheels once they were on the ground. Land in conditions with a steady breeze just a few miles per hour, let alone a stiff gust of wind, and the Pogo would careen one way or the other, with a good chance of wiping out anything in its path or, if it were on the water, falling overboard. Despite looking fairly little, this was a plane that was little only on the scale of aircraft, that is to say, still big enough to squish anybody trying to hold it still with their hands in a crisis. That was fine for a prototype, but it would have needed to be corrected before a production-line plane was ever built, and the engineers had little idea how to address the problem.\n\n## A Tactic in Question\n\nThe plane's tactical use was also in question, for several reasons. The Pogo was a prop plane, not capable of hitting Mach 1, meaning the aircraft of the time, including test aircraft that could fly at up to twice the speed of sound, would have been able to badly outclass it by the time it went into production.\n\nAnd the idea that it would have been of such great use defending ships was also in doubt. The aircraft's small size and high-powered engine would have meant a likely low endurance. The notion that a few Pogo aircraft could hold off an incoming attack really only made sense as long as there was air support nearby. Consider an example: say you're attacking a ship with three Pogos onboard, using a wave of nine aircraft. Maybe, if you throw all your planes at this ship at once, the Pogos and the ship's anti-air guns can hold them off until they've got to turn back because of low fuel. But send three planes, and then another three when their fuel runs out, and then another three, and now it's the Pogo all but guaranteed to run out of fuel before the last of your aircraft has to depart. At best, the Pogo would have been a delay tactic, and while that delay might have helped in very specific conditions, it wouldn't have been nearly useful enough to justify changing the US Navy's entire doctrine and approach to accommodate it.\n\n## Death of the Pogo\n\nEventually, it came time to let somebody else behind the stick of the Pogo, and all of its problems were put on full display. The next person to try flying it was one John Knebel, taking his shot in May 1955, without experience on the tether rig that Skeets had found to be so critical. The test flight was a disaster. Although after a full year the build team was able to move the rig to the test-flight field where the Pogo was in operation, it was already too late.\n\nSkeets had moved on from the project by then, the Pogo's gearbox was showing its age, some of the metal inside the prototype was degrading, and perhaps most important, the Navy was losing interest. Once thought too impractical for fleet-wide adoption, fixed-wing jets were now proving able to fly off aircraft carriers and land back on them, and the strategic and tactical issues with the Pogo meant it lacked the sort of redeeming value that might keep the project alive. Finally, the clearly immense training requirements, plus the apparent need for tether rigs as a teaching aid, were prohibitive to large-scale implementation. The extra-talented pilots who did stand a chance of flying it belonged behind the stick of a high-performance jet fighter, rather than doing guard duty with a prop plane on ships that weren't even important enough to be near an operating aircraft carrier in wartime.\n\nThe Pogo would fly for the final time in November 1956, by which time the Navy's VTOL program had been shuttered. It spent a few years as an informal, beloved gate guard at Naval Air Station Norfolk, Virginia, until 1973, when it was transferred to the National Air and Space Museum in Maryland.\n\nIn the decades after it flew, other aircraft would achieve the VTOL dream. In the United States, the V-22 Osprey is a troop transport that uses its two helicopter-like rotors to ascend and descend before pivoting into horizontal-flight mode. Britain's Harrier jump jet was capable of takeoff from extremely short horizontal runway paths, and the modern F-35 Lightning II uses lift fans to levitate from the ground before engaging in regular horizontal flight. The method the Pogo used to get off the ground, rather unsurprisingly, did not make a comeback. But it did turn the Pogo into the sole owner of a dubious but still impressive distinction: the weirdest little aviating pioneer that ever did fly.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The Convair XFY-1 Pogo was a US Navy VTOL prototype designed to let high-performance fighters operate from the decks of ships that lacked an aircraft carrier's protection.\n- It was a \"tail-sitter\" that perched upright on the tips of its delta wings and fins, taking off straight up before transitioning to horizontal flight, with twin nose-mounted contra-rotating propellers.\n- Test pilot James \"Skeets\" Coleman flew its first tethered flight on April 29, 1954, and made the first full vertical-to-horizontal transition on November 2, 1954.\n- Despite genuinely impressive performance, exceeding 300 mph and outrunning its own chase planes, the Pogo was plagued by hovering instability, blind upward-facing landings, no wheel brakes, and an unreliable ejection seat.\n- As a prop plane that couldn't reach Mach 1, with low endurance and immense pilot-training demands, the Pogo was outclassed by emerging carrier jets and offered too little tactical value to change Navy doctrine.\n- The program was shuttered; the Pogo last flew in November 1956 and now resides at the National Air and Space Museum.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What was the Convair Pogo?\n\nThe Convair XFY-1 Pogo was an experimental US Navy aircraft designed in the early 1950s as a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) fighter. It could rise straight up from the ground without a runway and then transition into normal horizontal flight. Designed under Project Hummingbird, it was meant to operate from a wide range of ships, not just aircraft carriers.\n\n### Why is it called the Pogo?\n\nThe nickname came from its landing gear. The aircraft perched upright on the tips of its two delta wings and two tailfins, balanced on a small wheel at each tip. Those wheels sat on several-foot-long struts built to compress inward by several feet on landing, much like a pogo stick, which gave the plane its bouncy little name.\n\n### Did the Pogo actually fly successfully?\n\nYes. After months of tethered tests in 1954, test pilot James \"Skeets\" Coleman achieved the first full vertical-to-horizontal transition on November 2, 1954, flying for twenty-one minutes. The Pogo even exceeded 300 mph at minimum throttle and could transition to horizontal flight just fifty feet above the ground, a feat later jet VTOL aircraft would take decades to match.\n\n### Why did the US Navy cancel the Pogo?\n\nThe Pogo had serious flaws: it was unstable while hovering, pilots had to land almost blind while facing the sky, the tiny tip wheels had no brakes, and the ejection seat was so unreliable that technicians disarmed it. As a prop plane it couldn't reach Mach 1, its endurance was likely low, and it demanded enormous pilot training. Meanwhile, jets were proving they could operate from carriers, so the Navy lost interest and shuttered the VTOL program.\n\n### What happened to the Pogo after the program ended?\n\nThe Pogo flew for the last time in November 1956. It then spent a few years as an informal gate guard at Naval Air Station Norfolk, Virginia, before being transferred in 1973 to the National Air and Space Museum in Maryland, where it remains today.\n\n### Did any aircraft eventually achieve the VTOL goal the Pogo was chasing?\n\nYes, though not with the Pogo's tail-sitting method, which did not return. Later aircraft realized the VTOL dream in other ways: the V-22 Osprey tilts its rotors, the British Harrier could take off from extremely short paths, and the modern F-35 Lightning II uses lift fans to rise from the ground before flying horizontally.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original MegaProjects video: The Convair Pogo: The US Navy's Weirdest Prototype Ever](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tFKoWYy38c)\n- [Convair XFY-1 Pogo — Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum](https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/convair-xfy-1-pogo/nasm_A19730274000)\n- [Convair XFY-1 Pogo — Military Factory](https://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.php?aircraft_id=1445)\n- [A Century of Flight: Taking Wing — Smithsonian Magazine](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/a-century-of-flight-taking-wing-96736390/)\n\n- [Hero image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Convair_XFY-1_in_flight.jpg) by U.S. Navy / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.\n\n## Related Coverage\n\n- [The A-12 Avenger II: The Stealth Bomber That Could Have Changed Everything](/article/a-12-avenger-ii-flying-dorito-stealth-bomber)\n\n- [Arleigh Burke: The U.S. Navy's Guided-Missile Destroyer Workhorse](/article/arleigh-burke-destroyer-us-navy-guided-missile-workhorse)\n\n- [The Convair B-36 Peacemaker: The Absolute Unit That Carried America Into the Cold War](/article/convair-b-36-peacemaker-cold-war-bomber)" url: https://megaprojects.pub/article/convair-xfy-1-pogo-navy-vtol-prototype.md canonical: https://megaprojects.pub/article/convair-xfy-1-pogo-navy-vtol-prototype datePublished: 2026-06-09 dateModified: 2026-06-09 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://megaprojects.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: MegaProjects image: "https://media.megaprojects.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,height=338,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/4tFKoWYy38c/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 0c490a477c513a8f588db9739869acc5e51bcffa548dd35081bba6bd58fa509a tokens: 5782 summaryUrl: https://megaprojects.pub/article/convair-xfy-1-pogo-navy-vtol-prototype.md.summary.md --- In the 1900s, humanity learned to fly. In the 1910s, humanity learned to fly *well*. In the twenties, people transitioned from aviation's wood age to the metal age, and in the thirties, the power of flight was spread to the masses for the first time. In the 1940s, the jet engine arrived on the scene, with the promise and potential to change everything. But by the 1950s, one critical tool still eluded the aviators of the world: VTOL. Vertical takeoff and landing wasn't entirely a secret; the world's first helicopter had flown just two weeks after the start of World War II. But until the power to take off and land without a runway could be combined with the power to fly like the best aircraft of the time, aviation still left something to be desired. And with a Cold War now underway, nobody could afford a second-place trophy in the VTOL race. For the US Navy, the VTOL problem was solved by the Pogo. One part helicopter, one part high-performance fighter plane, and about ten parts crazy, the Pogo is among the most hare-brained prototypes in aviation history. And it very nearly worked. ## The Issue at Hand It's worth understanding just why VTOL mattered so much, because that's what explains why the United States was willing to go to such ridiculous lengths to get the technology. VTOL had been on the wish-list for the Allied forces since the end of the Second World War, largely because of the advantages it offered in getting ground troops to places where they weren't expected. If the US could, say, lure a few thousand enemy troops into a massive battle at a fixed location, and then safely deposit several hundred soldiers in their back lines, that battle would be over before it ever really started. Troops could land away from the front lines, carry out operations, and then leave with minimal casualties, just flying back to where they'd come from. And constructing runways was one of the most time-consuming, tedious, and strategically costly things you could do in the wars of the mid-20th century. If troops at forward positions could be supplied, reinforced, and given air support without having to build a runway, they were at a massive advantage. Helicopters were slower, had a worse time protecting themselves, and offered less versatility, especially in the post-war years. But they were good enough to do the job until technology was ready to make VTOL aircraft happen at their own pace. Or, helicopters were good enough most of the time, with one key exception. Across all of World War II, there were few lessons more important than this: when it came to operations at sea, the presence of aerial assets was the difference between life and death. Ships that could operate within range of an aircraft carrier usually had it pretty good, while those that didn't found themselves in more trouble, more frequently. Germany and Japan had been caught somewhat off-guard by how effectively the Allies used their air power, but the Soviets knew precisely what the playbook was. If the two superpowers ever found themselves at war, the Soviets would understand that by America's own logic, any US ship without aircraft coverage was basically a sitting duck. ## Project Hummingbird By 1947, as the first jet-powered aircraft were still puttering across the skies above Europe and North America, America's Navy was already looking into a new take on the VTOL design. Designated Project Hummingbird, the initiative used captured intelligence and material from a World War II-era German test program, in collaboration with the US Army. Unlike the aircraft the Army was considering around the same time, the Navy's design was meant to be a light aircraft, a fighter if possible. It needed no runway space and could park in ones or threes or fives on the decks of a wide range of ships. Its profile would ideally be small enough that it wouldn't interfere too badly with day-to-day ship operations. And in a crisis, these planes weren't intended to win major battles all by themselves. Instead, they would be a delay tactic, buying precious minutes to slow down an enemy air attack before help could arrive from someplace else, or otherwise doing their best to ward off enemy planes before those planes inevitably ran low on fuel and had to turn back. At other times, they could conduct reconnaissance, scouting for submarines on the sea or scoping out targets in advance of small-scale raids. Even in small numbers, such an aircraft could contribute massively to the situational awareness and survivability of non-carrier naval task forces, merchant convoys, and even individual ships working far from support. In 1951, two companies were awarded contracts and asked to design and construct an X-plane, a proof-of-concept aircraft that would form the basis for later production designs. Those two companies, Lockheed and Convair, were each supposed to build two X-plane copies. But in an indicator of just how difficult this task would prove to be, neither would ultimately produce a second copy of their design. Lockheed's design was designated the XFV, sometimes referred to as the Salmon, and, spoiler alert, it never completed a vertical takeoff and landing sequence and was unable to fly horizontally. Convair, however, got better resources from the program and had a bit more success overall. Convair would produce the XFY, a bumbling little aircraft that would, in time, show why it deserved the bouncy little nickname it ultimately received: Pogo. ## The Pogo: An Odd Little Duck Just at first glance, it should be clear that the Pogo was an odd little duck, largely owing to the strangeness of its wing design. The Pogo was a propeller plane, not a jet like the ones becoming popular in both the American and Soviet arsenals, but it boasted a set of triangular delta wings. Those were not the sort of thing one would expect to find on a propeller aircraft of any kind, certainly not one this small. Yet the delta wings weren't even the strangest thing about it. That would be its lower fin. Most propeller aircraft have a tailfin, standing upright at the back of the plane, but the Pogo had a second, mirror-image tailfin, this one pointing downward. The fins were a lot bigger in proportion to the body than a normal tailfin, sort of crammed up toward the cockpit in a somewhat claustrophobic configuration. At rest, the Pogo would perch upright, sitting on the trailing edges of its two wings and two fins, balanced on a little wheel at each tip. Those wheels were supported on several-foot-long struts meant to compress inward by several feet when they landed, in a move reminiscent of the pogo stick that gave the aircraft its name. And the downward-pointing tailfin wasn't the only oddity onboard. Powered by an Allison XT40-A-14 turboprop engine, and designed to eventually incorporate a more powerful engine called the Allison T54, the Pogo used two propellers, both mounted on its nose, instead of just one. The two propellers were contra-rotating, which is to say that one rotated clockwise and the other counterclockwise, in a design that's somewhat more energy-efficient than a regular propeller. Its awful capacity to generate noise, its added weight to the front of a plane, and its mechanical complexity have generally made such a design uninteresting for aeronautical engineers. Contra-rotating propellers can be found on late variants of the British Supermarine Spitfire and the Soviet Tupolev Tu-95, but mostly they're a feature of various prototypes throughout time, with the occasional production aircraft usually not making it past a couple hundred copies. ## What the Pogo Could Do In terms of what the craft was actually capable of, it's rather difficult to say, since it never progressed to the level of testing that would have generated clear answers on those specs. Sitting empty, it weighed a bit over 5,000 kilograms, or 11,155 pounds, with an expected service ceiling of 37,533 feet, or 11,500 meters. It was expected to boast an impressive rate of climb and a top speed that, while still below the speed of sound, was expected to be somewhere in the four-to-five-hundred mile per hour range. It was a single-seater, measuring just 31 feet long, with its delta wings 26 feet wide. While the prototype was never fitted with armament, the Navy did have a fairly good idea of what they wanted onboard. At the time of early testing, the plan was to configure it with either a total of forty-eight unguided aerial rockets, or four 20-millimeter cannons, two each mounted on the tips of the horizontal-plane wings. The cockpit was specially built for the aircraft's flight style, with a rotating chair that could sit at about a forty-five degree angle when the plane was perched on its wingtips, and rotate to a regular, front-facing orientation when in flight. The cockpit was also equipped with a rope, so the pilot could get out safely in case of an emergency vertical landing away from the testing field. Finally, the lower tailfin was built to be jettisoned in the event the craft had to make an emergency horizontal landing, although whether it had a set of horizontal landing gear is less clear. ## The First Flights The Pogo's first flight took place on April 29, 1954, with test pilot and Marine reservist James Coleman, better known on the airfield as "Skeets," behind the stick. On that day, the Pogo was rigged up to safety lines, for a test flight that was very much the first of its kind. No American aircraft of similar size or engine power had ever attempted a vertical takeoff and landing, so in case something went haywire, a tether in the nose was ready to hoist the aircraft off the ground before it could take a little hop and crash catastrophically. Each wingtip was kept steady by another line, in the Navy's best attempts to keep the whole apparatus steady. The Pogo's tethered tests would go on for months. Skeets logged over sixty hours of flight time under those conditions, while those inside the hangar battled the incredible airflow that a downward-pulling, contra-rotating propeller system would generate. Several times, the tethering mechanism was the only thing that stopped the Pogo from falling onto its side. But by the end of that summer in 1954, the plane was deemed ready to move outside. On the first try, August 1, the Pogo lifted twenty feet from the ground, a little over half its length, or about six meters. On the second try, it rose to 150 feet, 45 meters. For the next three months, Skeets and his team performed another seventy flights of that same kind, taking off, hovering for a bit, and landing, before the moment of truth finally came on November 2 of that same year. On that day, the Pogo lifted straight up from the ground before transitioning into horizontal flight, flying for twenty-one minutes, hovering a bit longer, and setting back down on the ground. In subsequent flights, Skeets would take the Pogo to heights of over 3,000 meters, or ten thousand feet. ## Impressive Feats, Glaring Flaws Even with limited experiences like these, the Navy started to realize that the Pogo was capable of some pretty impressive feats. Even with its throttle set for minimum power, the plane was flying well past 300 miles per hour, around 500 kilometers per hour. In fact, because of the lack of speed brakes or spoilers on the airframe, the Pogo often outran the chase aircraft that were supposed to be monitoring it. The plane was able to transition to horizontal flight just fifty feet, 15 meters, above the ground, an exceptional feat that later jet-powered VTOL aircraft would take decades to match. Skeets worked out a mechanism to land the plane upright: approaching the spot where he wanted to land by flying horizontally low to the ground, then pitching straight up, cutting engine power, and letting the plane lose airspeed until it was hanging in midair. Then he'd fire the engines and stop at just the right moment to hover, and gradually cut the power until the plane was ready to land. But these test flights also revealed myriad issues with the Pogo's design, not least its inability to control its trajectory at low speeds. This was an issue in horizontal flight, but it got much worse when hovering, where the aircraft was not stable in the least, and constantly had to be course-corrected in midair to guide itself down. The problem only got bigger when the plane came close to the ground, with Skeets forced to fight the controls because of the immense backwash of his propellers, and the way the compressed air interacted with both his plane and the ground. Skeets boasted a 100% success rate in getting the aircraft down, but he was a very talented test pilot who had spent a whole lot of time getting every element of the Pogo's controls memorized perfectly. And even for Skeets, the Pogo's instability while in a hovering descent was just one of a wide range of problems. Because of the way the cockpit was oriented, landing involved looking almost directly up at the sky, where there were no reference points to measure the rate of descent. A small radar altimeter was provided to help, with a green-yellow-red lighting system to indicate when the aircraft was in a stable hover with a safe rate of descent (green and yellow), or moving toward the ground at an unsafe rate of over ten feet per second (red). Even then, a large part of his landings consisted of trying to look over his shoulder to gauge his rate of approach to the ground below. Making matters worse, the ejection seat on the Pogo was widely considered unreliable, to the point where hangar technicians eventually decided to disarm it. Skeets never once closed his canopy while flying the Pogo, always preferring to leave it open in case he had to manually heave himself out to avert an emergency. Other practical issues proved no easier to deal with. Because the Pogo landed on tiny little wheels at the four tips of its wings and fins, there was no real way to build a mechanism that could brake those wheels once they were on the ground. Land in conditions with a steady breeze just a few miles per hour, let alone a stiff gust of wind, and the Pogo would careen one way or the other, with a good chance of wiping out anything in its path or, if it were on the water, falling overboard. Despite looking fairly little, this was a plane that was little only on the scale of aircraft, that is to say, still big enough to squish anybody trying to hold it still with their hands in a crisis. That was fine for a prototype, but it would have needed to be corrected before a production-line plane was ever built, and the engineers had little idea how to address the problem. ## A Tactic in Question The plane's tactical use was also in question, for several reasons. The Pogo was a prop plane, not capable of hitting Mach 1, meaning the aircraft of the time, including test aircraft that could fly at up to twice the speed of sound, would have been able to badly outclass it by the time it went into production. And the idea that it would have been of such great use defending ships was also in doubt. The aircraft's small size and high-powered engine would have meant a likely low endurance. The notion that a few Pogo aircraft could hold off an incoming attack really only made sense as long as there was air support nearby. Consider an example: say you're attacking a ship with three Pogos onboard, using a wave of nine aircraft. Maybe, if you throw all your planes at this ship at once, the Pogos and the ship's anti-air guns can hold them off until they've got to turn back because of low fuel. But send three planes, and then another three when their fuel runs out, and then another three, and now it's the Pogo all but guaranteed to run out of fuel before the last of your aircraft has to depart. At best, the Pogo would have been a delay tactic, and while that delay might have helped in very specific conditions, it wouldn't have been nearly useful enough to justify changing the US Navy's entire doctrine and approach to accommodate it. ## Death of the Pogo Eventually, it came time to let somebody else behind the stick of the Pogo, and all of its problems were put on full display. The next person to try flying it was one John Knebel, taking his shot in May 1955, without experience on the tether rig that Skeets had found to be so critical. The test flight was a disaster. Although after a full year the build team was able to move the rig to the test-flight field where the Pogo was in operation, it was already too late. Skeets had moved on from the project by then, the Pogo's gearbox was showing its age, some of the metal inside the prototype was degrading, and perhaps most important, the Navy was losing interest. Once thought too impractical for fleet-wide adoption, fixed-wing jets were now proving able to fly off aircraft carriers and land back on them, and the strategic and tactical issues with the Pogo meant it lacked the sort of redeeming value that might keep the project alive. Finally, the clearly immense training requirements, plus the apparent need for tether rigs as a teaching aid, were prohibitive to large-scale implementation. The extra-talented pilots who did stand a chance of flying it belonged behind the stick of a high-performance jet fighter, rather than doing guard duty with a prop plane on ships that weren't even important enough to be near an operating aircraft carrier in wartime. The Pogo would fly for the final time in November 1956, by which time the Navy's VTOL program had been shuttered. It spent a few years as an informal, beloved gate guard at Naval Air Station Norfolk, Virginia, until 1973, when it was transferred to the National Air and Space Museum in Maryland. In the decades after it flew, other aircraft would achieve the VTOL dream. In the United States, the V-22 Osprey is a troop transport that uses its two helicopter-like rotors to ascend and descend before pivoting into horizontal-flight mode. Britain's Harrier jump jet was capable of takeoff from extremely short horizontal runway paths, and the modern F-35 Lightning II uses lift fans to levitate from the ground before engaging in regular horizontal flight. The method the Pogo used to get off the ground, rather unsurprisingly, did not make a comeback. But it did turn the Pogo into the sole owner of a dubious but still impressive distinction: the weirdest little aviating pioneer that ever did fly. ## Key Takeaways - The Convair XFY-1 Pogo was a US Navy VTOL prototype designed to let high-performance fighters operate from the decks of ships that lacked an aircraft carrier's protection. - It was a "tail-sitter" that perched upright on the tips of its delta wings and fins, taking off straight up before transitioning to horizontal flight, with twin nose-mounted contra-rotating propellers. - Test pilot James "Skeets" Coleman flew its first tethered flight on April 29, 1954, and made the first full vertical-to-horizontal transition on November 2, 1954. - Despite genuinely impressive performance, exceeding 300 mph and outrunning its own chase planes, the Pogo was plagued by hovering instability, blind upward-facing landings, no wheel brakes, and an unreliable ejection seat. - As a prop plane that couldn't reach Mach 1, with low endurance and immense pilot-training demands, the Pogo was outclassed by emerging carrier jets and offered too little tactical value to change Navy doctrine. - The program was shuttered; the Pogo last flew in November 1956 and now resides at the National Air and Space Museum. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was the Convair Pogo? The Convair XFY-1 Pogo was an experimental US Navy aircraft designed in the early 1950s as a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) fighter. It could rise straight up from the ground without a runway and then transition into normal horizontal flight. Designed under Project Hummingbird, it was meant to operate from a wide range of ships, not just aircraft carriers. ### Why is it called the Pogo? The nickname came from its landing gear. The aircraft perched upright on the tips of its two delta wings and two tailfins, balanced on a small wheel at each tip. Those wheels sat on several-foot-long struts built to compress inward by several feet on landing, much like a pogo stick, which gave the plane its bouncy little name. ### Did the Pogo actually fly successfully? Yes. After months of tethered tests in 1954, test pilot James "Skeets" Coleman achieved the first full vertical-to-horizontal transition on November 2, 1954, flying for twenty-one minutes. The Pogo even exceeded 300 mph at minimum throttle and could transition to horizontal flight just fifty feet above the ground, a feat later jet VTOL aircraft would take decades to match. ### Why did the US Navy cancel the Pogo? The Pogo had serious flaws: it was unstable while hovering, pilots had to land almost blind while facing the sky, the tiny tip wheels had no brakes, and the ejection seat was so unreliable that technicians disarmed it. As a prop plane it couldn't reach Mach 1, its endurance was likely low, and it demanded enormous pilot training. Meanwhile, jets were proving they could operate from carriers, so the Navy lost interest and shuttered the VTOL program. ### What happened to the Pogo after the program ended? The Pogo flew for the last time in November 1956. It then spent a few years as an informal gate guard at Naval Air Station Norfolk, Virginia, before being transferred in 1973 to the National Air and Space Museum in Maryland, where it remains today. ### Did any aircraft eventually achieve the VTOL goal the Pogo was chasing? Yes, though not with the Pogo's tail-sitting method, which did not return. Later aircraft realized the VTOL dream in other ways: the V-22 Osprey tilts its rotors, the British Harrier could take off from extremely short paths, and the modern F-35 Lightning II uses lift fans to rise from the ground before flying horizontally. ## Sources - [Original MegaProjects video: The Convair Pogo: The US Navy's Weirdest Prototype Ever](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tFKoWYy38c) - [Convair XFY-1 Pogo — Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum](https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/convair-xfy-1-pogo/nasm_A19730274000) - [Convair XFY-1 Pogo — Military Factory](https://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.php?aircraft_id=1445) - [A Century of Flight: Taking Wing — Smithsonian Magazine](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/a-century-of-flight-taking-wing-96736390/) - [Hero image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Convair_XFY-1_in_flight.jpg) by U.S. Navy / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. ## Related Coverage - [The A-12 Avenger II: The Stealth Bomber That Could Have Changed Everything](/article/a-12-avenger-ii-flying-dorito-stealth-bomber) - [Arleigh Burke: The U.S. Navy's Guided-Missile Destroyer Workhorse](/article/arleigh-burke-destroyer-us-navy-guided-missile-workhorse) - [The Convair B-36 Peacemaker: The Absolute Unit That Carried America Into the Cold War](/article/convair-b-36-peacemaker-cold-war-bomber)