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Flying Jeeps! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Flying Jeeps! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?While reading the story of the man responsible for the Blower Bentley, I stumbled across a passage recounting the use of one of the surviving cars for towing test-bed "flying Jeeps" aloft during World War II. Flying Jeeps?


Flying Jeeps! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?Yes, indeed! Turns out that the planners of the D-Day invasion wanted a better way to deliver Jeep-equipped troops behind enemy lines than stuffing them into Horsa gliders and letting them plow higgledy-piggledy into the French countryside.

Flying Jeeps! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?So, you rig up a Willys Jeep with an autogyro rotor unit, add a tail and some primitive flight controls, talk a couple of very gullible soldiers into getting in, and you drag it into the sky behind a bomber. As you might imagine, the Hafner Rotabuggy didn't work so well... which was a shame, because that meant that the planned flying tanks (!) never happened.
[Aviastar.org]

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