Piggyback Airplanes
Ten of aviation's most famous hitch-hikers.
- By Lynn Keillor
- Air & Space magazine, July 2012
NASM (SI-90-8818~A)
From today’s perspective, when in-flight refueling has long been routine, the early attempts to get airplanes to fly farther than their own gas tanks would take them seem almost comically desperate. The piggyback rides or kangaroo pouch-like transport flights, during which a mothership drags along a smaller parasite airplane, have the daffy quality of Buster Keaton silent-action gags—and a similar success rate. The surprise is that any carrier-parasite pairs were successful. Yet some of these “composite aircraft” were ingenious solutions to the problem of getting a payload to a faraway or otherwise difficult-to-reach destination.
As with all experimental aviation, the most memorable parasite airplanes weren’t necessarily the most successful. Often, the pair did not strike the right balance; others became obsolete before full testing was finished. Only a few, like the Maia and Mercury shown here (details below) had long, storied relationships. See the gallery above for more of our favorites.
Hitchhiker: Short S.20 Mercury
Mothership: Short S.21 Maia
England, 1937
It’s Wednesday, July 20, 1938, and a short but calculated conversation was taking place over Foynes, Ireland.
“Ready!” said Captain Donald C.T. Bennett, seated in a Short S.20 Mercury mailplane.
“OK and good luck,” replied A.S. Wilcockson, pilot of the Short S.21 Maia seaplane.
Bennett counted to three, then yelled, “Go!” Both men pulled a release lever, and Bennett was on his way toward Canada.
The next day, the front page of the New York Times bore the headline: “ ‘Pickaback’ Plane Spans Atlantic After Take-Off From Bigger Craft.”
It was a monumental day for aviation: The Mercury had become the first heavier-than-air commercial aircraft to cross the ocean, and in record time. It landed in Montreal 20 hours, 20 minutes after takeoff. Next stop: New York City.
While many parasite airplanes were attached to their hosts because they couldn’t travel far, the 51-foot-long Short S.20 could go the distance—it just couldn’t get off the ground. Carrying enough fuel to make a transatlantic flight (in addition to the mail) made it too heavy to achieve takeoff.
The Mercury and the Maia were developed together to solve this problem. “If an aircraft didn’t actually need to take off from the water but was ‘launched’ at flying speed, it might carry enough fuel to cross the Atlantic as well as a useful payload of mail,” says British aviation enthusiast Don Goodsell. With Maia’s assist, the letter carrier could put on nearly 10,000 additional pounds and still make it across an ocean.
On its first transatlantic attempt, all eight engines from both airplanes were needed for takeoff. The Maia used Bristol radial engines, but “the Mercury was a new design, with twin streamlined floats and four Napier Rapier H-configuration engines, a type designed by Major [Frank] Halford, who eventually headed the de Havilland Engine Company,” says Goodsell.
A few months later, the Maia air-launched the Mercury on a 6,045-mile journey from Scotland to South Africa—a record distance for seaplanes.
Testing stopped as World War II loomed, and soon both aircraft met untimely ends: The Mercury was given to Allied Dutch pilots for a year, then returned to the Short company and dismantled in 1941; the Maia was destroyed by enemy fire the same year.
Lynn Keillor is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer.
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Comments (8)
In 1957 I was the co-pilot on a SA-16A (Grumman Albatross)
Air Rescue Service amphib for a trans-Atlantic crossing, with a stop half-way across in the Azores. We were ferrying the aircraft from Wheelus AFB, Tripoli,back to the Grumman factory where the A/C would be overhauled and upgraded to a B model. If my memory is correct, the leg from the Azores to Argentia, NewFoundland took about 14 hours. That airplane could carry a lot of gas! That was the longest flight I can recall, with the possible exception of a LHR-LAX or a JFK-TelAviv nonstop when I was a TWA 747 Captain.
Posted by William Polk on May 23,2012 | 04:21 PM
I've read in some sources about an alleged fifth operational D-21 flight? Is there any truth to this? If so, what happened to it?
Posted by Gray Stanback on May 23,2012 | 06:41 PM
In the late 1950's I was in SAC 92nd bomb wing. On our base we had a reconnaissance squadron flying B-36R's. The B-36 was towed over a pit in the pit was an F-84R. The F-84 was attached to the bomber and raised up partially into the special bomb-bay. The F-84 was launched and retrieved in flight on the trapeze. The F-84 could be refueled and the film canisters changed in flight. There was even a film processing lab in the rear of the B-36.
We later had U-2's and the need for the tandem B-36 and F-84 was no longer needed.
Posted by JIm Fling on May 24,2012 | 05:14 PM
A specialized aircraft was designed and built to be uniquely carried by the B-36 internally, supposedly for defensive purposes. My recollection was it was built by McDonnell and designated XF-85.
Posted by Kendall Russell Maj Gen USAF (ret) on May 25,2012 | 04:44 PM
In the summer of 1953 following my Midshipman Cruise to Rio, I worked as Assistant PR Director of the first Dayton Air Show. When the Show began, I squired around Howard Sochurek and Marshal Lumsden of Life Magazine. I was able to get the three of us on board a modified B-36 that had its own fighter escort (F-84) join up at 10,000 feet, hook it to its boom and pull the fighter into the bomb bay. Howard and I took many pictures of the event from both the bomb bay and the blisters in the aft fuselage. The Air Force insisted on processing the film and the pictures never appeared in Life as the Air Force claimed that they showed too much secret equipment.
Posted by John B. Neff on May 26,2012 | 11:50 PM
There was also the German Mistel piggyback project that saw limited operatons late in WWII.
In a sense, the X-1, X-2, X-15 and some other experimental aircraft followed the piggyback concept. Only the X-1 was capable of taking off from the ground (and it did it only once) so they needed to be carried to altitude by a bomber.
Posted by Larry J on May 31,2012 | 01:20 PM
I was born in Dundee, and remember my Dad telling me how he had seen Mercury and Maia on the Tay. He could only have been 11 at the time, but was still excited at the memory. I was delighted to find a compilation of Newsreels on You Tube showing the aircraft, including them taking off from Dundee for the flight to South Africa - wonder where Dad was watching them from, and if he's in the background somewhere.
Link to the newsreels:
http://youtu.be/bYtazEBQ1K8
Posted by Mike Brand on June 17,2012 | 07:49 PM
Well, I'm not sure if this could be a piggyback "airplane", but the shuttle Enterprise was piggybacked to a 747 and a least one time separated in flight to test the feasibility of the landing procedure of the space shuttle.
Posted by Fernando on January 23,2013 | 04:35 AM