The Ugliest Airplane: An Appreciation | Hacker News Reader

The Ugliest Airplane: An Appreciation

smithsonianmag.com

115 pointsrandycupertino59 comments

I was lucky enough as a young child to see one of these working a high country farm - it was operating off a sloped runway and I was convinced it was going to crash as it landed uphill, then convinced it was going to crash after it took off after reloading due to how slowly it climbed - I can't find a definitive number, but I vaguely recall it had a take off speed that lurked around 50kt...

On the subject of top-dressers... ...I was privileged to see a turboprop equipped Fletcher FU-24 in action a couple of weeks ago, those pilots are very darn good at flying very low in hill country. Very loud and notable engine sound.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher_FU-24

50 knots rotation is perfectly fine for a plane that size. A Cessna Skyhawk is certified to rotate at 55 knots fully loaded (and since the stall speed is around 40knots, for specialty take-offs like soft fields it's much lower, 50knots is more than enough).

The part where it's carrying about a metric ton of phosphate while still being able to take off at that speed is really blows my mind.

Well, hope they reinforced the wings, that's a massive weak point for dusters.

This plane appears to be a (the?) leading crop duster today. It carries over 4 tons of payload.

https://airtractor.com/aircraft/at-802a/

Yes but that's got a powerful turboprop.

I remember seeing AirTruks operating as a kid too, they'd drive the ground truck in between the tail booms and fill it up with fertilizer through a canvas funnel. And some of the airstrips they operated out of were truly hair-raising, more ski jumps carved out of the side of a hill with a D4 than anything else.

For ugly aircraft, look up French pre-WWII military aircraft, things like the Amiot 143 (yes, that's a real aircraft, not an AI hallucination) or almost anything that Farman made, "let's put wings on an aviary!". I think the 143's main defense was that Bf110 pilots would be so distracted either boggling or laughing they'd forget to fire at it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PZL_M-15_Belphegor

The M-15 is still uglier. Also intended as a cropduster, though unlike the AirTruk it was really bad at that job in every way.

I'll raise you the Blackburn B-54 [0] and the Fairey Gannet [1].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackburn_B-54

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairey_Gannet

The fairy gannet looks like two smaller airplanes clipping into each other. It looks like an AI from ten years ago generated an image of an airplane. It looks like they hired engineers who got their degrees in Kerbal Space Program and then paid them by the hour. "Even if it's broke, it doesn't have enough features yet."

The Belphegor is still uglier though.

Now that I googled more pictures of it, I agree, the one in Wikipedia is obviously it's most flattering angle, looks almost... Rutanesque.

This photo though, I see what you mean.

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/z3envi/the_pzl_m1...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairey_Gannet_AEW.3

The AEW version looks ok

Yeah they improved it on the AEW, looks far less bubonic.

Not the Nimrod AEW though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Aerospace_Nimrod_AEW3

Yeah, bless the Nimrod AEW, WORST RHINOPLASTY EVER.

And I shall raise you the Stipa Caproni

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/05/13/the-strange-barrel...

I think this one is winning the inverse beauty contest.

It looks like it really wants to scoop up a large amount of plankton mid-cruise.

See also the Caproni Transaero, which isn't totally ugly but is messy in a "maybe more wings is better? some pushing engines at the back?" kind of way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caproni_Ca.60

> pushing engines at the back

Weird aircraft with a pusher engine? Curtiss-Wright XP-55 Ascender, right this way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss-Wright_XP-55_Ascender

(and check out the list of similar aircraft)

I had a bloody die-cast toy of that as a kid for some reason, I thought it was just a fake plane they'd invented to justify a toy!

Fairey who also came up with the Rotodyne, a cool part-plane, part-helipcoter, part-autogyro:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairey_Rotodyne

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkJOm1V77Xg - video by 'Mustard'

here is a great video documentary on the m-15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlyO9cJ8hiQ (Alexander the ok: PZL Mielec M-15: One of the Aircraft of All Time)

That image made me smile. Yeah, it would be bad at being a plane with poles attached to it like that. I'll see myself out now

You are off your rocker dude; the Belphegor is weird, but certainly not ugly. You want certified ugly? You'll find it under the synonym DFW T.28 Floh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DFW_Floh

Looks like a sun fish.

I dunno about ugly, I'd call it a "Chibi Biplane".

I have a lot of fondness for the AN-2 that this airplane aimed to replace.

That is, as well, an ugly plane, but once I parachuted out of one a couple of times, it grew on me.

I don't know, it's kinda slick looking - if you ignore the pylons.

I was half expecting to see the SNECMA C-450 'Coléoptère' in the article, with its office-tea-trolley wheels:

https://altitudepost.com/the-plane-without-wings-what-happen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleopter

> airtruk

You got to love that even its name is utilitarian.

This is such a cool story. Airplanes seem such a complex, standardized, full of red tape and elitist thing that such stories of hackers starting to pull random beams together and you get a thing that flies are pretty inspiring... And yet it also sound quite well thought. As usual, there is more than meets the eye

> Airplanes seem such a complex, standardized, full of red tape and elitist thing that such stories of hackers starting to pull random beams together and you get a thing that flies are pretty inspiring...

As a kid, I was introduced to the concept of ultralight[0] aircraft when me and a couple of friends stumbled upon a wreck of one in a field. Our parents realized it had to have come from the local place a few miles away. If your aircraft qualifies as ultralight, you do not need a license to fly it. A family friend of my parents had one that he'd roll out to the street, attach the wings, and take off, and then land back on the street, remove the wings, and roll it back into his garage.

These things were essentially go-karts with wings.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight_aviation

The red tape and standarization is only proportional to the liability, making things fly isn't all that hard.

One thing my son has always been obsessed with was planes. We started with paper planes, mainly the classic squarey one I learnt in school that has good balance of speed/airtime and tolerance to launching speeds and angles.

But he got bored and wanted more. We got deep in the rabbit hole of purely paper folding planes (and rockets), with regular visits to Ojimak[0] for more ambitious projects (they're 3D, glued, yet actually flying paper models).

Our latest endeavours involve keeping large Amazon delivery boxes to later take measurements, calculate weight balance, and creating airfoils by stacking several layers of cardboard in a tapered way to make gliders to throw outside (over 1m wingspan!).

In one of our walks we saw a man trying to put order in his garage; it was literally overflowing with home made RC planes, some were copies of standard designs, some quite unorthodox and some just plain head-scratching weird. We talked for a bit, he didn't even have technical background, and I was sold. Obviously it gets more expensive in terms of time and money, but I can't wait for my son to be old enough to dedicate time together in this direction.

[0] https://ojimak01.ehoh.net/hanger.html

As a kid in the 90s I discovered indoor free flight(1). It's a hobby where you build flying machines with balsa wood and carburator paper, and you power them with elastic bands using an old clock mechanism. Then people compete to see which airplane flights for the longest time, some flying for over 30 minutes!

This was magical to me. My "mentor" was able to build tiny butterfly-like contraptions with four flapping wings, and many other flying machines of different kinds.

Maybe this is interesting to your family as well!

(1) https://indoorfreeflight.com/

Oh thanks! We've made small gliders and those butterflies with rubber bands, but I never thought that mode of operation went that far. It makes sense to use something that requires higher torque like clock mechanism to limit the speed of the blades/wings, the basic builds don't fly that well or for long precisely because the faster you spin (more twists) the less effective the angle of attack is, with gliders you need a somewhat precise alignment in terms of twists+launching speed in order for them to fly just ok!

I actually think the Super Guppy[0] is the ugliest, hotly contested by the Optica[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Spacelines_Super_Guppy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgley_Optica

The Guppy is very ugly, but I think the Optica is quite nice — the large duct is a bit ugly, but the rest of it has good lines

I also like the Optica! It somehow has a lot of space vibes from Freelancer and FireFly. Shame of the large toy like duct indeed. But I suspect it works!

The cockpit projects from the ducted fan?! That’s certainly a design.

From all the examples in the comments, I'm learning that the most reliable way to make an extremely ugly aircraft is a stubby look where the body is tall and the rear half seems to just end early.

If you invert what people's expectations are for aircraft, you'll get a lot of detractors.

Some like the Long-EZ, some see a face only a mother could love.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Long-EZ

9 fatalities in 88 incidents from 1967-2010 of 138 built 1966-1993.

It's possible some are still intact and maybe a couple are still flyable. The only recent evidence any maybe still intact is a 2017 photo of ZK-CVB on static museum display at MOTAT NZ.

https://aviation-safety.net/asndb/type/PL12

https://www.airhistory.net/photo/896371/ZK-CVB

Steve Death does sound like a Mad Max name.

It looks kinda cute if you ask me

> agricultural airplanes don’t make money when they are on the ground

Neither do any other airplane types. Airliners, for example, are designed to minimize the need for maintenance and the fastest turnaround, because an airliner loses money at a prodigious rate when it sits on the ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transavia_PL-12_Airtruk

aussie plane makes me think of the aussie flyer in the road warrior. (not even the same, but spiritually)

This is mentioned in the article:

> But the airplane never became popular—although it became briefly famous when a heavily made-up example starred in 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

I was referring to the copter pilot in the road warrior, same scrappy tininess.

beyond thunderdome was the next in the series.

Ah, I was getting my bodged-up post-apocalyptic Aussie aerial transports mixed up

"He started with a large, steel, barrel-shaped tank and began adding."

I thought everybody used aluminum?

That was a prototype.

Update: I guess the final design also used steel.

> The pilot is above both the engine and the load, and is surrounded by a steel tube truss for maximum safety.

It was designed to carry to operate from very rough "airstrips" which is a very optimistic term for "a paddock that the farmer hopefully mowed recently and if you're lucky, they also removed most of the bigger stones".

I also imagine in the postwar WW2 antipodes, steel was a lot easier and cheaper to access, as well as work.

Steel alloys have better fatigue properties than aluminum. Many of us in aerospace would happily use a corrosion-resistant steel if not for the weight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_limit

Did anyone else think the first photo was AI-generated at first, due to how unusual it looked?

…can I still get one?

We doan need no steenkin' fuselage!

Best part is no part

I like it

(2021)

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