The rising demand for short-haul air transport with its attendant problems of community disturbance, airport congestion and increasingly longer total journey times is well recognised in many parts of the world. Equally accepted is the need for a radically new solution to these problems with a major V/STOL transport sub-system which can both be integrated with operations at existing airports and extended as necessary to new airports in urban areas without sterilising large areas of real-estate. All this has been argued at great length many times in many places and there have been many “solutions in search of the problem”. This paper reviews some of the possibilities from the engine manufacturers’ point of view without commenting on the relative merits of rival aircraft proposals.