F-84 Taking Off from the Back of a Truck

With the Cold War at full throttle, the United States Air Force was worried that a sudden Soviet attack in Europe would leave American planes with no usable runways to counter the aggression.

Enter the ZEL or the zero-length launch. This extraordinary concept explored how to blast a jet fighter straight off the back of a truck with a solid-fuel rocket. This footage shows the technology being applied to an F-84G Thunderjet, the first type of aircraft used for this test.

The majority of the ZEL experiments were thoroughly performed at the US's Flight Test Center throughout the early 1950s. Although manned testing was relatively successful after a few tries, no ZEL- configured aircraft were ever used operationally, as the emergence of missiles significantly reduced the necessity of airplanes for a nuclear counterstrike.