Rich Goodwin's Jet Pitts, displayed at the RAF Cosford Air Show, represents one of the most technically audacious experimental aircraft flying in the world today. Built on the airframe of a Pitts Special — a biplane long favored in unlimited aerobatic competition for its agility and structural rigidity — Goodwin's creation grafts two Lynx turbojet engines producing 350 lbs of thrust each onto a platform already powered by a tuned Lycoming AIO-540 piston engine. The combined power output yields approximately 1,700 lbs of total thrust against an airframe weighing roughly 1,550 lbs, producing a thrust-to-weight ratio that exceeds 1:1. This figure places the aircraft in performance territory normally occupied exclusively by frontline military jets and places it well beyond the envelope of any certified aerobatic aircraft.
The practical consequence of that thrust-to-weight ratio is a set of flight characteristics that fundamentally depart from anything in the civilian aerobatic world. The Jet Pitts can transition directly from takeoff to a vertical climb without building airspeed first — a maneuver that requires energy management and pilot technique drawn more from jet fighter doctrine than from aerobatic competition coaching. More dramatically, the aircraft is capable of a sustained torque roll and controlled hover, exploiting the asymmetric torque of the piston powerplant at near-zero airspeed while the jets maintain altitude. This combination of sustained vertical authority and low-speed controllability places the Jet Pitts in a unique category that blurs the boundary between fixed-wing aircraft and rotorcraft in terms of observable flight behavior, even though the aerodynamic mechanisms involved are entirely conventional.
For working pilots, the Jet Pitts is less a practical reference point than an illustration of what becomes possible when power loading is removed as a constraint. Professional aerobatic pilots routinely operate within tight thrust, weight, and structural limits, and sequences are designed around energy conservation — trading altitude for speed and back again within a defined aerobatic box. An aircraft with a thrust-to-weight ratio above 1:1 eliminates the energy deficit that defines most of those tradeoffs, allowing maneuvers that would otherwise bleed energy past recovery. Business jet and airline pilots familiar with high-bypass turbofan climb performance will recognize the vertical acceleration behavior in broad terms, but the Jet Pitts achieves comparable performance at a fraction of the gross weight and with none of the aerodynamic refinement that makes modern jet transports efficient at altitude. It is brute-force performance engineering at small scale.
The appearance of the Jet Pitts at Cosford fits within a long tradition of UK airshow culture that platforms experimental and hybrid aircraft alongside military hardware, treating engineering innovation as entertainment worthy of a mainstream audience. The RAF Cosford Air Show draws significant crowds and occupies a respected position in the European airshow calendar. Goodwin's aircraft has appeared at major shows across the United Kingdom and Europe, where it functions simultaneously as a crowd spectacle and as a demonstration of what certificated experimental categories permit when a skilled pilot and engineer push boundaries deliberately. The aircraft holds no type certificate and operates under experimental permissions that would not exist in most commercial or Part 91 contexts, a distinction that matters operationally even as the performance it demonstrates informs understanding of propulsion, energy management, and aircraft handling across the broader aviation community.