Challenge: name an airplane uglier than the Lloyd Luftkreuzer

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This is not what I'd call attractive! Almost looks like a kid's toy that got hit in the center with an ugly stick--that's why it's bent. Piaseki Airjeep.

It was quite real. Even more amazing, it flew.
 
Lack of money=lack of resources and a hampered product. End of it all... good aircraft.
There's also the fact that Frederick Handley Page refused government encouragement to merge with other aircraft manufacturers but insisted on remaining independent, after which whatever money there might have been in the RAF's budget was never going to be allowed to go towards the company.


It didn't help that the rivet holes were punched through the skin rather than drilled creating micro fractures that grew and blew out the windows.
The frustrating thing was that the plans called for glue and drilled rivets plus rounded windows but for reasons which escape my memory wasn't used during construction. You've still got de Havilland playing silly beggars with the gauge of the skin due to lack thrust produced by the Ghost but that's at least a known fix.
 
View attachment 514448
This is not what I'd call attractive! Almost looks like a kid's toy that got hit in the center with an ugly stick--that's why it's bent. Piaseki Airjeep.

It was quite real. Even more amazing, it flew.

At least that's not just begging for a sniper to pick the pilot off. You'd better not lose your footing when you land either. One slip and you're one minced G. I.

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At least that's not just begging for a sniper to pick the pilot off. You'd better not lose your footing when you land either. One slip and you're one minced G. I.

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That looks more like something for use in a movie made from a comic book! "Time for the Batchopper!" Or for a villain, flying low to attack whoever with the classic disregard for physics of the Helicopter Blender! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HelicopterBlender
 
Cueing off some of the form-follows-function in our ugly/beautiful design discussions; Giuseppi Bellanca's early designs were often kinda angular, ungainly looking craft. However, by all accounts I've read, they were brick-outhouse sturdy and efficient performers. Beauty in action, rather than on the tarmac.
Fair enough. He does deserve more recognition for designing the first aircraft to fly non-stop from Japan to CONUS, a distance of over 4,500 miles.
 

McPherson

Banned
Someone mentioned a Fleet Air Arm AEW bird as butt ugly as the AEW Avenger. It occurred to me that this beast might be this critter:

aircraft-gatwick-aviation-museum-RN-Fairey-Gannet-AEW3-restoration-project.jpg


Fairey Gannet, with the radome in the wrong place, to make it worse?

Fairey_Gannet_AEW3%2C_UK_-_Navy_AN1339874.jpg


A whole row of them.

And even in the clean ASW version, they look screwed up.

Gannet_AS.4_NAN9-79.jpg


Fairey_Gannet_COD.4_aboard_USS_Bennington_%28CVS-20%29_in_1965.jpg


Short version of ugly.

The folding wing tended to stick at the top of the Z-joint.

Quick release harness buckle for the pilot tended to get stuck. Not too bad if you had to cut yourself out of the harness after a trap, cause the plane captain could always replace the harness, but a bit awkward if you had to bail out cause the Double Mamba turbo-prop engine ingested gear filings and bits of housing casing from the contra-rotator gear assemblies as the gears tore themselves to bits. This happened more often than the RAF or the Luftwaffe liked to admit. The pilot loss was bad enough, but the Gannet was EXPENSIVE in either the AEW or ASW role.
 
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These two proposals from 1964 thankfully never left the drawing boards as they would have most certainly ruined the reputation of one of the last and best British designed airliners, the Vickers VC10. These were concepts for a "jumbo jet" variant based on that beauty.

The P.579 would have two VC10 standard fuselages coupled into a single airframe side by side, powered by four tail mounted Rolls Royce Medway RB 177 engines, span 182 ft, 5in, length 143ft, 10in, maximum take-off weight of 500,000 lbs and a total passenger capacity of 300 seats.

The P.580 went one better and had three fuselages powered by six tail mounted Rolls Royce Medways, span 201 ft, 8in, length 175ft, 10in, maximum take-off weight of 675,000 lbs and a total passenger capacity of 450 seats.

How would liked to have been seated in that middle tube. No view and hopefully no need to ever evacuate.
 
OTL dH Comet was a pretty airplane and the first jet to enter airline service. I suffered fatigue cracking problems around window frames because the first design was modified to square corners and they learned the hard way about fatigue on pressurised cabins. Remember that Comet was also one of the first passenger airliners with pressurisation and they flew much higher (greater pressure differential) than piston-pounding predecessors.
De Havilland were well aware of the stress concentrations of square corners and the Comet 1 did not have square windows but ones with rounded corners. When the thin skin/riveting issues began cracking under the stresses of repeated pressurisation cycles the cracks went to the nearest other stressed point which was the edges of the rounded corners. Certainly oval windows were a better idea but the problem began at the rivets in the thin skin. Possibly all aided by the choice of aluminium alloy chosen for the skin IIRC. Very few accidents have one cause. Almost always there are multiple issues which individually are survivable but when combined are fatal.
 

McPherson

Banned
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Not necessarily ugly, but just weird. Does anyone know what this bird is? I take it that it is French built, but I have never seen it before.
 
For just weird there is the Blackburn Beverley!
Blackburn_beverley_in_1964_arp.jpg

Its most interesting design quirk being the Toilets in the Tail. A potentially lethal piece of design as it was necessary to walk over the Paratroop Hatch to reach them, there was in fact a fatality due to this.
 

McPherson

Banned
For just weird there is the Blackburn Beverley!
Blackburn_beverley_in_1964_arp.jpg

Its most interesting design quirk being the Toilets in the Tail. A potentially lethal piece of design as it was necessary to walk over the Paratroop Hatch to reach them, there was in fact a fatality due to this.


"Going to the loo."

"Watch out for the hole in the floor."

"What hooooooooooleeeeeeeeee shiiiiiiiii……"

"That hole."
 
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