A DARPA artist's rendering of the Northrop Grumman concept for TERN, a "tail-sitter" drone that takes off and lands vertically on smaller ships' flight decks. It could fill a major gap in the capabilities of the Littoral Combat Ship.
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Back in the 1950s, the US Navy was looking for a way to give destroyers and frigates an effective way to take on enemy air attacks—a sort of "first responder" aircraft that could take to the skies to hold off hostile aircraft until carrier-based fighters arrived and give those ships the ability to strike over the horizon at enemy ships. The answer they came up with was a "tail-sitter" propeller fighter aircraft that took off like a helicopter and transitioned into winged flight.
While several experimental aircraft were developed, including the General Dynamics Corvair XFY-1 "Pogo" and the Lockheed XFV-1 (also known as the "Salmon"), these aircraft with counter-rotating propellers were never deployed—mostly because they couldn't match the airspeed of the jet aircraft they would likely face in combat, and the Navy was afraid pilots wouldn't be able to handle the complexities of landing the things on a small, pitching deck. The Navy instead focused on missile defenses and carrier battle group tactics, and they depended on helicopters to provide smaller ships with the ability to reach out further—to strike at submarines, provide gun spotting, and (with the MH-60 Sea Hawk helicopter) shoot up less robustly-defended targets on the ground and on the sea.
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