Man has been flying longer than most realize. Eilmer of Malmesbury, an English Benedictine monk, flew for about 200 meters using a glider in 1010 AD. Manned flight only truly progressed after the Wright brothers made the first sustained, controlled, powered heavier-than-air flight at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.
A plane lands somewhere in the world every 3 seconds. The last 110 years have produced an astounding array of flying machines. These are twenty-one of history’s strangest aircraft.
Early experiments
The Caproni Ca.60 Noviplano was a nine-wing flying boat intended as a prototype for a 100-passenger trans-Atlantic airliner. It flew once on 4 March 1921 over Lake Maggiore in Italy. It reached 18 meters before crashing. The pilot survived.Stipa-Caproni, an experimental Italian aircraft with a barrel-shaped fuselage (1932).
Vertical take-off and platforms
De Lackner HZ-1 Aerocycle flying platform, designed to carry one soldier on reconnaissance missions (1954).Lockheed XFV, “The Salmon,” an experimental tailsitter prototype escort fighter aircraft (1953).Snecma Flying Coleoptere (C-450), a French experimental annular wing aeroplane. It used a turbo-reactor to take off and land vertically (1958).Bartini Beriev VVA-14, a Soviet vertical take-off amphibious aircraft (1970s).Dornier Do 31, a West German experimental VTOL tactical support transport aircraft (1967).Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar, a VTOL disk-shaped aircraft developed as part of a secret U.S. military project (1959).
Unconventional wings and shapes
Alexander Lippisch’s Aerodyne, a wingless experimental aircraft. Propulsion came from two co-axial shrouded propellers (1968).Ames-Dryden (AD)-1 Oblique Wing, a research aircraft designed to investigate the concept of a pivoting wing (1979 – 1982).Vought V-173, the “Flying Pancake”, an American experimental fighter aircraft for the United States Navy (1942).Northrop XB-35, an experimental flying wing heavy bomber developed for the United States Army Air Forces. Photo: U.S. Air ForceX-29 forward swept wing jet plane, flown by the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center as a technology demonstrator (1984 – 1992).Libellula, a tandem-winged and twin-engined British experimental plane designed for carrier landings (1945).
Oversized cargo and transport
B377PG – NASA’s Super Guppy Turbine cargo plane, first flown in its outsized form in 1980.The Airbus A300-600ST (Super Transporter) or Beluga. This modified A300-600 carries aircraft parts and oversized cargo.
NASA research and prototypes
Hyper III, a full-scale lifting body remotely piloted vehicle built at the NASA Flight Research Center in 1969.Proteus, a tandem-wing, twin-engine research aircraft built by Scaled Composites in 1998.McDonnell XF-85 Goblin, an American prototype jet fighter intended for deployment from a B-36 bomb bay (1948). Photo: U.S. Air ForceX-36 Tailless Fighter Agility Research Aircraft, a subscale prototype jet built by McDonnell Douglas for NASA (1996 – 1997).
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Man, it’s amazing that some of these even got built letter alone got off the ground!
Man, it’s amazing that some of these even got built letter alone got off the ground!
How the hell did some of these even get off the ground? Amazing, truly!!