Boeing X-50 Dragonfly

The Boeing X-50A Dragonfly, first known as the Canard Rotor/Wing Demonstrator, was an experimental unmanned vertical take-off aircraft developed by Boeing and DARPA to prove that a helicopter rotor could be stopped in flight and then act as a fixed wing. A single turbofan drove the rotor through tip jets for hovering and was switched to a rear nozzle for forward flight, so no tail rotor was needed. A canard foreplane and a conventional tailplane shared the lift in forward flight. Two prototypes were built and the first flight took place on 24 November 2003. The first crashed in March 2004 and the second was destroyed in April 2006, and neither ever completed the transition to forward flight, so DARPA ended funding in 2006.