Vickers Wild Goose

Wild Goose was a research unmanned aerial vehicle built and flown by the designer Barnes Wallis to test a tailless variable-sweep aircraft with a radical control system, in which the whole wing is moved in flight instead of using a tail and conventional control surfaces. Wallis called the idea a wing-controlled aerodyne. His employer Vickers could not sponsor so large a project, so the variable-sweep anti-aircraft missile Green Lizard was proposed and Wild Goose presented as the research needed to win government funding. A large radio-controlled model was launched from a rocket-powered trolley on rails. The first two crashed on take-off, the third flew successfully on 19 January 1950, and the project ended in 1954 when the military lost interest in the missile. Wallis went on to develop the idea as the Vickers Swallow.