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;...
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