The Avrocar may look like a flying saucer from a sci-fi movie ... the design flaws of the craft required pilots to control each engine separately, which proved incredibly difficult.

Then there’s the turborotor engine embedded within the central ... Avro Canada constructed a prototype VZ-9 for real-world testing. The flying saucer underwent a series of ground tests and ...

Frost called it the "pancake engine." With the powerplant still ... rendering the technology a failure. Even so, Avro's flying saucer inspired the Moller M400, a VTOL-style flying car (that ...

designed a primitive turbine-engine plane in 1909 and a scale-model saucer in 1947. But his great contribution to the art of making flying saucers was the principle he discovered in 1937 ...

Resembling a small flying saucer, the Avrocar was only 18 feet in ... the internal ducting robbed much of the engine’s power. Despite many design changes, the total thrust emitted from the ...

A more accurate description of the device might be that it is a saucer, 20 feet wide when inflated ... briefly fired its engine twice to get LOFTID oriented properly for re-entry into the atmosphere.