Focke Rochen

The Focke Rochen, German for Focke Stingray, was a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft project designed by Heinrich Focke of the Focke-Wulf company towards the end of the Second World War. It is also known as the Focke-Wulf Schnellflugzeug or the Focke-Wulf VTOL, and it was named after the ray because of its unusual shape. The layout was a circular aircraft with an airfoil-section body and an open centre acting as a duct for two large contra-rotating propellers, driven through an axle and gearbox by a projected Focke-Wulf turbojet. Forward flight was to come from directing the propeller downwash rearward through louvres, with auxiliary combustion chambers on the trailing edge acting as primitive afterburners. Focke patented the idea in 1939 and filed a further patent in 1957. A wooden one-tenth scale model was built in Bremen after the war and tested in a wind tunnel, but the aircraft itself was never built.