I would assume the project was scrapped because it is basically impossible to land on a submarine.
It is hard enough to land a helicopter on a ship with a proper flight deck. But landing a much less stable VTOL on a tiny submarine without any sizeable flight deck in the 60s was completely out of the question.
> But landing a much less stable VTOL on a tiny submarine without any sizeable flight deck in the 60s was completely out of the question.
Hey, it was the 1960s. The times when people pulled off stunts like dropping a payload less than a meter wide from a satellite and catching it mid-air[0], without anything resembling a computer available to design or coordinate such missions. I'm pretty confident they could get a VTOL to land on a submarine, if they seriously put their minds to it.
Well i am sure you can find some daredevil who can do such a landing under the right conditions.
But the military requirements are such, that good conditions are not the norm.
There are missions in harsh weather (and weather at sea is a completely different animal compared to weather on land or in the air at a few kilometers height).
Up in the sky the conditions are stable and picking up a parachute with an aircraft is something you can easily retry a few times when you fail.
Missing the landing on a submarine results in a sunken aircraft (and possibly pilot).
Pilots have varying skill levels and are expensive to train just look at training requirements for the people landing on aircraft carriers.
If you look at loss rates of military aircraft in any period you will find, that a astonishing portion of the losses are due to accidents.
Landing a hard to control VTOL on a small spot on a submarine (which itself is somewhat small and thus unstable) will cause a tremendous amount of attrition among the aircraft and pilots.
It is just far more efficient to shot a cruise missile at a target, than going through the hassle of having aircraft drop a bomb and then return with a low chance of survival.
Hawker Siddeley Harrier (1967) was a VTOL that could have done this, although I don't think even Eric Brown was quite mad enough to try it.
He did try the "rubber flight deck", an equally crazy scheme: why not save weight on landing gear by having a rubber deck just after the arresting gear, so the aircraft would catch the hook and belly-flop onto it?
The Japanese I-400s were originally fitted with float planes, but these became fire-and-forget kamikaze aircraft by the end of the war (planned attack on the Panama canal that never happened).
The Germans had an autogyro that was let out on a cable from the U-boat, used for spotting. Not sure if this ever saw production / combat, but IMO that's already at the limit of what is sensible in submarine aviation.
They actually did attack Oregon with a similar setup (but an I-25 submarine) . They dropped some incendiary bombs on the forests near Bandon, OR hoping to cause massive fires, damage war critical timber production, etc.
I guess they didn't think about how hard it is to start a forest fire on the Oregon Coast in winter though.
Nope. Here it is, the Ryan X-13.[1] First VTOL jet. Landed tail-first and hooked itself to a raised platform. As a demo, one was landed at the Pentagon in 1957.
If there had been a need, a fleet of VTOL-fighter carrying submarines would have been built. The USSR never built a navy which required something like this to counter it.
I came across this in my days in aerospace, and an ex-Navy fighter pilot at work said he didn't see that landing as a difficult task.
The cylindrical hull that makes submarines efficient under water makes them roll a lot when on the surface. That would make it very difficult to handle planes (whether taking off or landing).
I would assume the project was scrapped because it is basically impossible to land on a submarine.
It is hard enough to land a helicopter on a ship with a proper flight deck. But landing a much less stable VTOL on a tiny submarine without any sizeable flight deck in the 60s was completely out of the question.