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Comment by EdwardDiego | Hacker News Reader

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EdwardDiego·

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

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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'

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.

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