Today in History – July 26, 1998 – Burt Rutan launches first flight of the Scaled Composites Proteus

26 July 1998 – Burt Rutan’s “Scaled Composites Model 281 Proteus is a tandem-wing high-altitude long endurance aircraft designed by Burt Rutan to investigate the use of aircraft as high altitude telecommunications relays. The Proteus is a multi-mission vehicle able to carry various payloads on a ventral pylon. The Proteus has an extremely efficient design,

Today in History – May 18, 1958 – Super Sabre gets airborne in ZEL “130,000 lb Kick in the Pants” takeoff

By MB Barrett

18 May 1958 – In a Zero-Length Launch (ZEL) experiment, a U. S. Air Force North American F-100D Super Sabre becomes airborne with no runway or take-off roll at all, using its own engine in afterburner and boosted by a 130,000-pound- (58,967-kg)-thrust Astrodyne rocket.

Zero-Length Launch was a program developed to enable interceptors to be deployed without any runway at all. The program went into production but was scuttled once-reliable missiles took on the role of interception.

Video from https://www.australianflying.com.au/videos/friday-flying-video-f-100-zero-length-launch#:~:text=Zero%20Length%20Launch%20was%20a,on%20the%20role%20of%20interception.

Source: Wikipedia: Portal:Aviation