Coleopter
A
coleopter is a type of vertical take-off and landing aircraft design that uses a ducted fan as the primary fuselage of the entire aircraft. Generally they appear to be a large barrel-like extension at the rear, with a small cockpit area suspended above it. Like most ducted fan designs, coleopters are generally arranged to take off and land on its tail. The term is an anglicisation of the French
coléoptère after the first actual implementation of this design, the SNECMA Coléoptère of the mid-1950s. The first design of an aircraft clearly using the coleopter concept was developed during World War II. From 1944 on the Luftwaffe was suffering from almost continual daytime attacks on its airfields, and was finding it almost impossible to conduct large scale operations. Their preferred solution was to introduce some sort of VTOL interceptor that could be launched from any open location, and there were many proposals for such a system. Heinkel conducted a series of design studies as part of their Wespe and Lerche programs.