Are there any more aircraft which had 4 tail mounted engines?

The four-aft-engine configuration represents one of aviation's most distinctive and short-lived design philosophies, with the three aircraft cited — the Lockheed JetStar, Vickers VC-10, and Ilyushin Il-62 — constituting essentially the complete roster of production aircraft to employ it. The Lockheed JetStar, which first flew in 1957 and entered service in the early 1960s, pioneered the arrangement in the business jet category, clustering four small turbojets in two paired nacelles flanking the aft fuselage. The Vickers VC-10, which entered British Overseas Airways Corporation service in 1964, and the Soviet Ilyushin Il-62, which entered Aeroflot service in 1967, independently arrived at the same solution for long-range airliner design, each mounting four engines in side-by-side pairs at the rear fuselage. Beyond these three, no other production aircraft adopted the specific four-engine aft-fuselage layout, making this one of the rarest powerplant configurations in commercial aviation history.

The engineering rationale behind the four-aft-engine arrangement was compelling on paper. Concentrating all propulsive mass at the tail allowed designers to build a completely clean, uninterrupted wing optimized for high-lift performance — a critical advantage for the VC-10 operating from short, hot-and-high Commonwealth airfields and for the Il-62 serving the Soviet Union's vast and often primitive airport network. Removing engine pods and pylons from the wing also reduced aerodynamic interference drag and simplified the wing structure. However, the configuration introduced severe center-of-gravity management challenges. The Il-62, notably, required a tail-mounted ballast weight to prevent the aircraft from tipping onto its tail when the passenger cabin was empty — a structural and operational peculiarity that underscored the fundamental tradeoff the design demanded. Maintenance access to the rear-mounted engines was also considerably more difficult than with wing-mounted alternatives, increasing turnaround times and ground support complexity.

The configuration's rapid disappearance from new designs after the mid-1960s reflects broader industry convergence toward under-wing podded engines, driven by the introduction of high-bypass turbofans. High-bypass engines, which deliver dramatically better fuel efficiency, are inherently larger in diameter — making aft-fuselage mounting geometrically impractical and structurally costly due to the bending moments imposed on the tail section. Boeing's 747 and the subsequent wide-body generation demonstrated definitively that large, efficient turbofans belonged under the wing. The VC-10 and Il-62 both remained in service for decades — the Il-62 continued flying into the 2010s with some operators, and VC-10s served the Royal Air Force as tankers until 2013 — but neither design was developed into successor variants with updated powerplants, and no manufacturer attempted to revive the four-aft-engine formula.

For professional pilots and aviation operators, the historical significance of these aircraft lies partly in what their operational characteristics revealed about engine-out handling. With all four engines clustered at the tail, asymmetric thrust in engine-failure scenarios produced very different yaw and pitch coupling compared to wing-mounted configurations, requiring distinct training profiles and emergency procedures. The JetStar remained a presence in corporate flight departments and fractional operations into the 1990s, and pilots who flew it often noted the unusually benign stall characteristics attributable to the clean wing — a direct dividend of the aft-engine design. The broader lesson for the industry was that configuration elegance must ultimately yield to propulsion economics, a dynamic that continues to shape airframe decisions as manufacturers evaluate hybrid-electric and distributed propulsion architectures for next-generation aircraft.