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A coleopter is a type of Vertical Take-Off and Landing aircraft design where the fuselage is surrounded by an annular wing. The aircraft is intended to take off and land on its tail. The term is an anglicisation of the French coléoptère (beetle) after the first actual implementation of this design, the SNECMA Coléoptère of the mid 1950s.
While the SNECMA machine may have been the first of this type of aircraft to actually be constructed, the approach itself was first put forward in Germany late in World War II as a possible layout for point defense interceptors at a time when German airfields were under regular attack by Allied bombing. Two proposed Heinkel designs, the Wespe and the Lerche II were to use this layout, but neither of them was ever actually built.
SNECMA's experiences demonstrated formidable control problems, both with balancing the aircraft during vertical flight, and in transitioning between vertical and horizontal flight and back.
An American design, the Hiller VXT-8, was abandoned before a prototype was ever built.
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