Modern-Aviation

1950s were a time of great advances in aviation; the Percival P.74 was responsible for none of them. Looking as if the company’s designers were tasked to make a workable helicopter from a drawing by a three-year-old child, it featured a bulbous fuselage with tiny wheels and a comically out of proportion tail rotor.

Presumably feeling there was nothing left to lose it was decided to power it by using tip-jets to drive the rotors and control their pitch with trailing edge ailerons. The observant reader will notice both these features have failed to make it into widespread production today...

To provide air for the tip jets, two Napier Oryx gas turbines drove air compressors, the combined exhausts from both turbine and compressor then being ducted to the rotor tips. As someone had decided to put the engines in the belly this involved large ducts of hot air going up either side of the cabin, splitting it in two.

They probably kept it warm, though. More worryingly, the only access to the cockpit was through the gap between these ducts, the sole door being at the back of the aircraft. This rather comical loser should not detract from Percival’s better aircraft, like the excellent, and exceptionally beautiful Mew Gull racer of the 1930s.