What’s That?

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 lift. Carried up to 30 passengers in an era where a dozen was a lot. Flew commercially only in freight, hauling a car around to [...]

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 by the  Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp engine. Killed more of its own pilots than those of the enemy. So do you know what [...]

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 Thunderbird car. Supposedly easy to fly, stable, easy to maintain and just $10,000. It never got off the ground as a commercial venture. So do [...]

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 speed, and tough construction. Simple, easy to maintain, cheap to build, cheap to operate. So do you know what this aircraft is?       [...]

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 landing speed. Its descendant was provided to the Japanese military. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY below [...]

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 promise. A rare two-seat fighter with a rear gunner. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY below with [...]

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 fuselage. A variant was the designer’s personal aircraft after the war. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY [...]

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, you might know the design…. Dates from the early 1930s. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY below [...]

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 aircraft. All that capability and it boasts an engine of just 45 hp. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post [...]

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 establish a new aviation industry. For light ground attack, trainer, and even passenger transport! So do you know what this aircraft is?       [...]

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 micro plane at its best! Powered by a 30 hp VW car engine or a Porsche — really. So do you know what this aircraft [...]

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 sensor pods. Slow and highly maneuverable. A single, reliable Pratt Whitney PT6 engine. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post [...]

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 noise it produced. A single engine jet for low altitude work — too noisy for the job. Holds the ignoble title of the world’s slowest [...]

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 armed with 2x 20mm and 1x 30mm cannon. Generally underwhelming in performance. Four years before the famous Curtiss-Wright XP-55 Ascender. So do you know what [...]

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 with no tail skid. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY below with your best guess! Click here [...]

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 is it in British colors with the RAF. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY below with your [...]

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 usage where there is little. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY below with your best guess! Click [...]

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 wartime service, but soon replaced. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY below with your best guess! Click [...]

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 metal fabrication. Over a year of work before it was abandoned. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY [...]

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, and vastly unarmed. Despite all those wings, it climbed like a flying pig. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post [...]

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 altitude records as well! Too late for the Great War, however. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY [...]

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, single passenger flights at one point! So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY below with your best guess! [...]

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 formations before the “finger four”. So do you know what this aircraft is? Bonus Answer:  What was the new formation the aircraft type pioneered?   [...]

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 back”. No better way to eat a $2,000 hamburger. Bankrupt. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY below [...]

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 flew, despite great promise in the design. The pilot would fly while lying down, prone, in the cockpit. A single engine super jet that was [...]

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 “wonder bomber”, but surpassed in seven years. Boasting two 1,000 hp engines, powerful for its time. Is that the ghostly image of a Civil Air [...]

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 time. A single seat, single engine plane boasting an incredible 1,000 hp. Known and named for its excessively long nose. The fastest seaplane never [...]

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 in history — well, maybe…. Twin engines but four rotors boasting 13 foot diameter each. This was the last aircraft built by the company before [...]

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 on the wings. A single vertical tail, blended into the cockpit like the Gee Bee racers. A 480 hp engine swinging a single two-bladed prop. [...]

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 few days before the airfield was overrun in 1941. Its final score stands at an unbelievable 11 kills for zero lost in combat. Powered by [...]

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 designer’s first truly flyable airplane! Destroyed on its longest flight (the pilot survived but was injured by glass from his broken goggles). So do you [...]

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 on each side spun the spindles. The Magnus Effect, invented by physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus (1802-70). But did it ever fly?  That is a good [...]

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! Popular with its pilots, but not many built. So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY below with your [...]

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 are designed like a car with a wheel atop a stick. A pedal on the floor deploys the flaps — and there are no rudders! [...]

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. The designer would go on to producing one of the USAF’s fastest bombers. Looks like a NASA X-Plane, but it is not, though it was [...]

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 1945, designed during the last months of World War II. The design pioneered the swept wings of some of the first fighter jets. A true [...]

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 the skies over Italy and later over the Baltics and Sweden. Designed to weigh in at less than 500 lbs! So do you know what [...]

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 and design. It featured three engines but just two counter-rotating propellers underneath. A larger version would have featured seven engines, but without funding, was never [...]

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 powers the spirited little aeroplane. An early bird that flew competitively in France and England. And yes, those are wing tip ailerons, as in, oh [...]

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 go far. It is either English, French, German or American? So do you know what this aircraft is?       Post a REPLY below [...]