Helijet Aircraft

From ‘Thunderbirds’ created by Gerry Anderson in 1965

This type of Helijet appears ina few epsiodes of Thunderbirds - ‘The Imposters’ and ‘30 Minutes After Noon’. To me it feels like the passenger version compared the bigger, chunkier Helijets featured in ‘Pit of Peril’ and ‘End of the Road’. A really good looking aircraft.

This painting shows the helijet in New York City at the event of moving the Empire State Building. Although it does not appear in this epsiode (Terror in New York City) , the series has such a rich world that even thoigh we don’t see it we can imagine one or two hovering around trabsporting VIPs or being used fr News Coverage.

I think this model was created later in the series and as such is most likley a Mike Trim design as Derek Meddings was so busy directing ad supervising all of the VFX. Although I don’t know this for sure, but following the rule of thumb that if it has intakes it is a Derek Meddings design and if it has probes it is a Mike Trim design it could be one of Derek’s

This model was adapted and appeared in episodes of ‘Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons’ and ‘Joe 90’.

(It looks like tail plane pieces from the Revell Fairey Rotordyne model kit were used for the legs, and a horizontal tail plane from an F104 Starfighter seems to have been used for the vertical tail assembly).

Designed (probably) by Mike Trim