One of our readers' curiosities is about the ugliest planes in the world. Really, it's hard to choose just one, we have several that we could put on a list.
And with a focus on this type of questioning, we did an internal survey, along with some details, about the ugliest planes ever produced.
To organize our whole idea, let's divide it into categories, listing examples of military and commercial planes according to the size of the aircraft.
Cri-Cri – The smallest twin engine in the world
The Colomban Cri-Cri project is quite funny. It was created in the 70's to be the smallest twin-engine plane in the world, and the result is a look similar to a Jetsons micro-spacecraft.
Easy to fly, the Cri-Cri is practically an open patent plane in the world, with several different versions created over the last few years. The first and most traditional one has a simple and functional low wing and straight geometry, together with two engines located in the front part of the 425-cylinder, single-cylinder aircraft with 15 horsepower (each).
The result is a plane with a total weight of 78 kg, perhaps lighter compared to the pilot himself. After the Airbus has launched an electric version of the Cri-Cri, and other creators put model airplane reaction engines.
A curiosity is that the name Cri-Cri means "cricket" informally in French.
McDonnell XF-85 Goblin
Weird is one of the adjectives we can give to the McDonnell XF-85, an experimental plane created during the Second World War to be a parasitic fighter, capable of being transported inside the Northrop XB-35 and Boeing B-36 planes.
With an ovoid shape, short and folding wings and triple empennage, along with a horizontal stabilizer with negative dihedral, the “Goblin” was, to say the least, super weird, even by the standards of the time.
The idea behind its creation was to solve a major problem for the US Air Force: The range of bombers was increasing, but fighters did not evolve so much in this regard. The result was a lonely flight of bombers, without attack planes to accompany them as is currently the case, due to aerial refueling.
OK! The Boeing B-36 project even went ahead, but not on the right date, and the XF-85 was simply discontinued by McDonnell after demonstrating inferior performance to the jet fighters that were being developed. We consider this a correct decision, in our eyes, not performance.
Stipa-Caproni and Caproni CA.60
The Stipa-Caproni is another short plane that causes strangeness when we see it for the first time. Created in the 30s, the aircraft had the possible advantage of having an “incubated propeller”, with the pilot standing at the top of the entire circular surface of the fuselage.
Let's not blame Luigi Stipa, the design was the basis years later for the first fighters, which had a central jet engine. The Stipa-Caproni had the characteristic of being a hyperstable plane, difficult even to carry out commands to change the attitude of the aircraft.
The disproportions between the vertical and horizontal stabilizers, wings and fuselage made this plane enter our list of “uglies” in aviation.
Continuing the list of weird things that fly, and with Caproni on the list, we took the opportunity to pull the CA.60, certainly something quite unusual in aviation.
The CA.60 was created in 1921 to be a large aircraft at the time. For this, the engineer Gianni Caproni exaggerated the sizes, equipping the plane with 9 wings of 30 meters in length and eight engines of 400 hp (each).
The fuselage, in a very unusual format by today's standards, had a total length of 23 meters, and gave the plane the ability to land on water.
The plane even flew smoothly after taking off for the first time. In the second round of tests, the aircraft flew for a short period of time when the pilot Federico Semprini tried to take off from Lake Maggiore, but the structure broke and Gianni Caproni never designed something similar again due to the high cost.
The plane was named “Transaero”, but its success at the time was due to the name capronissimo, very Italian.
Vought V-173
Built as part of a series of tests of new aircraft in the early 40s, in World War II, the Vought V-173 is one of the examples of how the creativity of engineers can result in a visual aberration, respectfully speaking.
The idea of the V-173 was to create a functional wing plane, using two piston engines with propellers. Its creator, Charles H. Zimmerman, believed that the disk-shaped plane solution was a good idea to reduce drag and increase performance.
In level flight, the V-173 had the characteristic of reducing the frontal area, and consequently the surface drag. However, the disc-shaped fuselage caused abnormal behavior at a high angle of attack, with a tendency to stall.
This problem demanded extra attention from the pilot in order not to put the plane in its aerodynamic limit, something complicated in an era without Fly-By-Wire. The project, however, went ahead with the XF5U despite its problems, but it was canceled after the war.
Interestingly, the Americans call this plane the “Flying Pancake”.
Leduc xnumx
In the 50s, engineer René Leduc had a brilliant idea to develop an innovative aircraft, incorporating the engine cowling into the fuselage. The result was the Leduc 022, equipped with a Ramjet engine and capable of flying at Mach 1.15, obviously breaking the sound barrier.
The life of the Leduc 022 was extremely short. Created to be the prototype of a modern and fast interceptor, construction of a prototype was started and the aircraft was modified several times from 1954 to 1957 to put technologies under development.
The first flight took place in May 1957 and more tests followed in the following months. However, a test in December of the same year destroyed the only prototype, which caught fire during takeoff.
The Armée de l'Air closed the money tap for the project and decided to prioritize a more conventional aircraft, the Mirage III, a much faster interceptor, which reaches Mach 2.2.
Yes! The pilot was located in front of the air intake of a turbojet/ramjet engine. Have ears to handle the noise.
Aviation Traders ATL-98 Carvair
The Carvair is certainly one of the highlights of this list in of operational aircraft, along with the Cri-Cri. This one was created by Aviation Traders, based on the conversion of a DC-4 for the transport of cargo entering through the nose. At that time, in the 50s, we didn't have planes like the Boeing 747 and the Antonov An-124/225 on the market.
This plane was allocated on ferry flights to transport cars and people, typically it could be loaded with 22 seats and five cars on board. The high operating cost generated by the type of service to be carried out, and also by the characteristics of the conversion, made the use of Carvair unfeasible for a long period.
Prominent among its odd features is the bubble-shaped front of the fuselage, much larger compared to the short fuselage of the DC-4, which remains on the plane, as do the wings. The engines are Pratt & Whitney radials.
To improve the Cavair's track record, of the 21 units built, eight were lost in accidents.
EC-707 Condor – This one got the mumps
The Boeing 707 was a typical success in the commercial and even military aircraft market, with famous versions such as the KC-135 and the E-3D Sentry radar plane. From these versions exclusively used for missions, the EC-707 Condor was born, a rather strange aircraft due to its radars.
The aircraft gains this strange aspect to have three AESA-type radar antennas, enabling coverage to track other aircraft up to 270 degrees, with a 400 km range. The entire conversion process is carried out by IAI, from Israel.
Other IFF, ESM/ELINT systems have 360° coverage, and the plane also has extra UHF, VHF and HF radio antennas, with broad spectrum coverage. These systems are used to detect ships and planes, with the ability to “link” 100 different targets.
This plane is known as EC-707 Condor when operating in Chile, or EL/M-2075 Phalcon, in its Israeli version. It is impossible not to notice the large nose of the aircraft, together with the two lateral antennas just in front of the fuselage.
Of course, we are already carefully preparing a Part 2 on this same subject with other planes, there are many examples, it is not possible to summarize everything in the same list.
