The odd ones.. Chance Vought V-173 and XF5U-1 Flying pancakes

Sometimes there comes along an engineer who thinks out of the box and designs a concept that catches the attention. Charles Zimmerman is one of these guys. In the 1930:s he was thinking about ways to cancel the end effect of the wing, to eliminate, or reduce the lift vortex that substantially contributes to the airplanes drag. His idea was to put two huge propellers on the tip of the wing, rotating in opposite direction to the lift vortex and thereby cancel most of the drag. (At least that was his idea) and to minimise drag, a flying wing concept was preferred. It did not need to have a huge span because of the vortex cancelling, so the plane ended up looking like a pancake. Since it had huge propellers, it almost worked like a helicopter, and the idea was born for a vertical take off.

I can not go trough all the ideas and details here, but there is a book that describes the airplane in detail: “Naval fighters number twenty one Chance Vought V-173 and XF5U-1 Flying Pancakes” ISBN 0-942612-21-3 It is a short book, and the prints are not all that good, but as a sum up of an interesting airplane, it is OK.
I’ll end up with a quote from the book: “It is probably just as well that the F5U program was terminated when it was. The concept will live on as an unfulfilled dream rather than as the disappointment it would have probably become. The performance projections were undoubtedly optimistic and the actual and prospective shortcomings of the concept and design were being overlooked or minimized.”