VTOL Aircraft

VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) denotes aircraft able to take off and land vertically while also achieving forward flight. The concept is seeded in this wiki by the source dossier on the Focke Rochen, which the source describes as "a German VTOL aircraft project" and which the archive page also calls the Focke-Wulf VTOL.

The Rochen as a VTOL case

The Rochen's approach to VTOL, as described in the source, is a ducted-lift arrangement rather than a tilting rotor or vectored jet:

• Lift is produced by Contra-Rotating Propellers housed in the open center of a Circular-Wing Annular-Duct Configuration.
• The transition to forward flight is made by redirecting the propeller downwash rearward through Downwash Vectoring Louvers below the propellers.
• Additional horizontal thrust is claimed from Auxiliary Combustion Chambers (Rochen) on the trailing edges of the circular wing, fed by a forked exhaust nozzle and acting as primitive afterburners.
• Low-speed control is claimed to come from varying power to each auxiliary chamber through two small nozzles.

The source states that the project was never built, so none of these mechanisms were demonstrated in flight.

Limitations of the source

The source page is a secondary encyclopedia summary. It gives no performance figures, no test results and no dimensions, and it describes the design in the conditional mood. This page therefore records the concept as the source presents it, not as a validated engineering result.