Flying plate
11 February 1953, a Canadian newspaper, Toronto Star, published a sensational report that, at the Avro Canada plant in Moulton, a fantastic vertical take-off and landing aircraft is being built at the request of the military, which can reach speeds up to 2400 km / h. Five days later, under public pressure, the Canadian Department of Defense was forced to officially confirm the information, but refused to disclose the details of the project.
The first version of the apparatus called Project Y was not a plate. Frost considered the tip of a spear to be the perfect scheme for such an exotic vessel. In 1952, the Avro Ace delto wing wooden layout was built. But this design had a lot of flaws, the main of which were poor visibility and instability in hovering when landing.
In 1953, Frost took the project out of the blind alley by starting the construction of a disk-shaped apparatus, code-named Avro Canada VZ-9A, with a centrally located jet engine of its own design and guided nozzles distributed around the perimeter. Take-off and landing of the car had to be very soft due to the formation of an air cushion near the surface. The climb was supposed to be accelerated with the help of the Coanda effect - the sticking of an air stream from the engine to the curved surface of the wing when fed through a narrow channel. The stream flowing around the wing creates a rarefaction above it, which carries the apparatus up. The horizontal flight and maneuvering of the Frost disk ensured that the nozzles changed the thrust vector. The theoretical speed limit of VZ-9A was estimated at 2400 km / h, and the calculated ceiling reached the lower layers of the stratosphere. Such aviation I didn’t know those times.
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