An Early Lifting Body
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Designed just two years after the end of the Great War. A lifting body design that added more than 1/4 to the available
Category: What’s That?
Hot Rod of the Winter Sky
This Week’s Hints to help you along: A brilliant combat design, fast and with fine maneuverability. Wings and fuselage were made of plywood; didn’t fare well in the weather. Powered
A Revolutionary One-Man Helicopter
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Designed by two college dropouts in their 20s. However, neither designer knew how to fly a helicopter! Body styling reminiscent of a Ford
Close Air Support REJECTED
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Lost out in the bid to be the leading CAS aircraft. A brilliant design, even with its Hersey Bar wing. Amazing visibility, slow
Super Streamlining for Speed
This Week’s Hints to help you along: A record-setter showcasing advancing streamlining. A fuel tank atop the fuselage, blocks the pilot’s view. Nearly 200 mph, yet still a very slow
A Nenadovich Biplane Type
This Week’s Hints to help you along: A Nenadovich design, fairly unique in aeronautical engineering. Designed by one nation, finished and flown by another. A wartime experimental design that showed
Not a Captured French Plane
This Week’s Hints to help you along: A rotary engine fighter from the Great War. 80 hp when more powerful engines were preferred. Looks like French wings on a German
American Ingenuity
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Two cylinders and 150 hp. No combustion required in the cylinders! Can rotate the prop either direction — reversing thrust! Based on, well,
An Aerobatic Amazement
This Week’s Hints to help you along: A 1950s, fully aerobatic job that still amazes. Belgian, but most popular in the UK. Not a home built, but a full production
Weird, But Not French
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Not everything in the skies that looks weird is French. A German’s first foreign production plane after WWII. A late-1950s effort that helped
The VW of the Skies
This Week’s Hints to help you along: From 55 years ago, before the home-builder revolution. Perfectly at home on wheels, skies or floats. Less than 350 lbs empty weight, a
A New Sensor Platform
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Designed as a sensor platform for counterinsurgency. A twin-boom design reminiscent of the Skymaster and Mohawk. To carry wing-loads of rockets and other
An Absolute Failure
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Designed to replace a venerable, well-used type. Outlasted by the plane it was designed to replace. Named after a demon because of the
An Unexpected Canard
This Week’s Hints to help you along: A single prototype of a highly innovative design. It crash-landed, killing the test pilot when it hit a tree. A fighter to be
Don’t Flare on Landing
This Week’s Hints to help you along: An old design from a classic designer. So underpowered and yet it flew. The rudder cables are below the fuselage. Tricycle gear yet
Narrow and Sleek
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Twin-engine and those look like American cowlings. The rudders give a good hint, but not Earhart. A wartime design but relatively unknown. This
Elliptical Wing Wonder
This Week’s Hints to help you along: The wing really is elliptical and it flies! Little wingtip vortices improves performance 30%. Structurally more sound than conventional designs. Made for civilian
The First Pencil?
This Week’s Hints to help you along: The first plane designed for mass production. Used any of at least five engines. It was all the rage in Mexico! Pressed into
Pushing the Boundaries
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Designed at war using captured Nazi jet engines. Paved the way to 30 years of design development. Delayed as the factory didn’t know
Quadraplanes Forever
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Four wings, the top and bottom ones nearly identical. A heavy night interceptor with a headlamp! A crew of four with two engines,
A Weird Triplane
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Yes, those are American insignia on the wings. Clearly inspired by the famed Fokker Dr.I Triplane. Fast and well-designed, setting speed records. Set
Nearly 100 Years Ago
This Week’s Hints to help you along: A two-seat trainer that was quite reliable. Once displayed huge swastikas on the wings. Le Rhone powered, licensed rotary engine manufacturing. Flew commercial,
An Anti-Submarine Seaplane
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Patrol, reconnaissance and anti-submarine roles. Deployed late in the Great War in small numbers. Successfully attacked and nearly sank a submarine! Pioneered new
Pocket Jet!
This Week’s Hints to help you along: A sub-mach mystery aircraft with a short history. The ultimate “V-tailed Doctor Killer” perhaps? Seats two — a pilot and the “guy in
Not a Salamander
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Form follows function and thus, it appears like a Salamander. The wings appear the same as on the Bell X-1 “Glamorous Glennis”. Never
The Javan Rhinoceros
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Played a key role in an early WWII battle bombing shipping. Despite its age, still the bomber with the highest performance. Once the
A Hydrofoil-Seaplane?
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Featured a boat propeller at the back to get up to speed. A flight propeller at front — only one prop could operate
A Quad-Rotor Tilt-Rotor
This Week’s Hints to help you along: A brilliant tilt-rotor design, yet from over 50 years ago. Yes, those are tandem wings, a rather unusual configuration. The stubbiest nose wheel
Bat Out of Hell
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Designed from one of the first flying wing plans that was for leisure flying. Later developed into a fighter aircraft with two cannons
A Valiant Fighter
This Week’s Hints to help you along: A dozen in service, only 3 to 5 at a time rose to face hundreds of the enemy. Battles raged for just a
Backwards Thinking
This Week’s Hints to help you along: The designer taught himself everything by trial and error in the mid-1900s. Innovative in every way and featuring tandem wings. This was the
Spindles for Wings?
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Its wings are circular spindles that spin to create lift. A 1930s era experimental plane that didn’t work so well. A motorcycle engine
Twin-Boomed Terror
This Week’s Hints to help you along: A twin-tail, pusher plane meant for military service. Yes, those insignia are crosses, but whose? And when? Beautiful candy-stripe coloration on the twin-booms!
As Easy as Driving a Car!
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Streamlined and bearing the classic curves of the late 1930s. The exhaust pipe is a flyover in front of the windshield. Control systems
Not a NASA Project
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Another wartime design, this one meant to press supersonic speeds. Flight tested as a glider successfully before the end of World War II.
Not Quite a Flying Car
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Created in tough times by one of the world’s leading design firms. Flight tested extensively but never meant for production. A product of
Not Much More Than a Glider
This Week’s Hints to help you along: Set three world records between 1927 and 1930 — none for speed. Featured a 3-cylinder radial engine with just 18 hp. Seen in
Roswell Revisited?
This Week’s Hints to help you along: In a secret hangar, this flying saucer languished due to budget limitations. It was not quite in Roswell, but nonetheless Roswellian in nature
The Flying Masterpiece
This Week’s Hints to help you along: The product of a well-mustached, wide-eyed French aviator. Just 200 kg, 9 meters long and 10 meters in wingspan. A 70 hp Gnome
The First Flying Saucer?
This Week’s Hints to help you along: What may be the world’s first flying saucer. Couldn’t compare to the popular Blériot planes. An innovative design from a designer who would