Different kind of aircraft wank: Airplanes that should have not entered service

Another view of Dutch CW-21s

Curtiss-Wright CW-21 Demon.jpg
 
Three CW_21B's were on their way to the AVG to become flying Tigers but bad gas landed them in the Burma jungle. The Vultee P-66 vanguard, another trainer-based fighter ended up having their undercarriages broken off by Chinese pilots in India.
 
There is a German ironic proverb that says, freely translated: Why do it simply, when there is a complicated way to do it? I always suspected that the designer of the Bell YFM-1 Airacuda had made this his motto. Lesser men might simply put the cannon in the fuselage when they had to arm a twin-engined plane, but the Airacuda is designed as a twin-engined pusher with the engine nacelles enlarged in such a way that each of them can house a gunner.
A quote from the wikipedia article: The cannons had a tendency to fill the gun nacelles with smoke whenever fired and, additionally, fears persisted as to how the gunners would escape in an emergency, with the propellers directly behind them. An emergency bailout would have required both propellers to be feathered, though additional provision was made with the use of explosive bolts on the propellers to jettison them in the event of a bailout.

Of course this plane was unable to compete against single engined planes in a dogfight, but it was also too slow to intercept most contemporary bombers.

Another quote from the Wikipedia article:
The Allison V-1710-41 engines, though relatively trouble-free in other types, had no additional cooling systems. Like many pusher designs, they were prone to overheating. On the ground, the aircraft had to be towed to and from the runway and could only be started when the Airacuda was able to take off immediately. Even in the air it was not uncommon to experience overheating problems.

Still another quote:
The Airacuda was also saddled with a complex and temperamental electrical system and was the only aircraft ever built to rely on an independent auxiliary power unit (APU) to power both engine fuel pumps, as well as all aircraft electrical systems. Systems usually powered by an aircraft's engines were instead powered by the single generator. The generator, with its own supercharger, was located in the belly of the aircraft. In the event of a failure (and they occurred frequently), the crew was instructed to begin immediate emergency restart procedures as the aircraft basically shut down. When the APU failed, the pilot had "NO fuel pressure, NO vacuum, NO hydraulic pressure, NO gear, NO flaps and NO ENGINES"

One prototype and 12 production aircraft were built, and one operational squadron was formed, which mercifully stayed in the continental United States.

Bell YFM-1 Airacuda Bodenphoto frontal schwarzweiss.jpg
 
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What about the Soviet helicopters, the Hind and Hip? Hind is a trade of helicopter that tries to trade of to many things at the same time. It has so much armour it have to gain lift from a pair of wings making it instabile at times and its roles as it's own escortor attack helicopter gives the pilot to much to do. And it doesn't even carry that many troops.

Wouldn't an attack/escort helicopter like Apache/Cobra operating with a squad carrier helicopter like Huey/Blackhawk make more sence? Especially if they could be built with a lot of parts in common.

The old type Bell AH-1 Cobra and the UH-1 Iroquoi were related and shared engine, transmission, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AH-1_Cobra#Background

Well, I believe that the Russians figured that out and don't really use the Hind as a troop carrier anymore--just a heavy attack helicopter which can, in some conditions, carry troops (eg., as a medevac or special operations chopper). Still, they probably would have been better off deleting the troop-carrying requirement and simply using a different helo (or a variant of the Hind itself) as their transport.

Despite the advantages, it's seems obviously stupid to me to combine an attack-helo and a transport in one; the first needs to be as small as possible to be as small as a target as possible, the other needs to be as roomy as possible...
 
I agree with you on the P-35. It would've made a decent fighter trainer in CONUS, but as a front-line fighter in the Philippines? Forget it. The P-35s that were sent to the Philippines were originally sold to Sweden, but the planes were requesitioned before they were loaded aboard ship, and the birds wound up in the Philippines-in their Swedish markings, all the tech orders were in Swedish, instruments in metric, etc. It took the 17th Pursuit Squadron a while to figure out the plane, and when they got P-40Es, the newly arrived 34th (whose P-40s were still en route to the Philippines on 8 Dec 41 and never arrived) PS got the P-35s. There were 36 in the Islands on 8 Dec. Two made it thru the Bataan campaign to fly out the night before the surrender, one of them having two pilots riding in the baggage compartment, while the other had three pilots riding in that compartment. There were two on Mindanao also, but they were destroyed before the general surrender in the Philippines.
 

Markus

Banned
The Curtiss Wright CW-21 Demon. A quote from the Wikipedia article:

The CW-21 was not commissioned by the U.S. military, though it was test flown at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. The Army Air Corps immediately rejected the aircraft, with one officer commenting that it took a genius to land it.

See P-40, B-26 and F4U. :(
 
Messerschmitt Me 321 Gigant assault glider. It was so big that at first there was no suitable tow aircraft. The Heinkel He 111Z Zwilling (Twin) was developed to remedy this shortcoming, but before it was developed, an arrangement was tested where three Messerschmitt 110 destroyers had to tow one Me 321. The following quote from this http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/models/Aircraft/Messerschmitt-Me321.html site offers some interesting details how that worked out in practice:

BIG Towing Problems:
A major problem was provided by the lack of a suitable tow plane. The Ju-90 possessed barely sufficient power to tow the glider off the ground with minimum ballast, and although work had commenced on the Heinkel-Zwilling intended specifically to act as an Me 321 tug, it was obvious that some considerable time must elapse before this unique aircraft could be made available to the Schleppstaffeln.

An interim solution was the so-called Troika-Schlepp or triple-tow arrangement of three Bf 110C fighters evolved after a great deal of experimentation. The Troika-Schlepp demanded a very high degree of proficiency, on the part of the tow plane pilots, and in theory the three Bf 110 fighters took off in close-vee formation towing the Gigant by means of 10-mm. steel cables, that of the lead aircraft being 328 ft. in length and those of the port and starboard aircraft being 262 ft. long.

Apart from the ever-present danger of collision during the take-off, the Troika-Schlepp method had the disadvantage of necessitating a concrete runway at least 3,950 ft. in length, and the preliminary preparations for take-off were so complicated that it was utterly impossible to send up several gliders simultaneously. The take-off sequence called for the Gigant to un stick first at around 55 m.p.h., followed by the outboard tow planes and finally the lead tow plane. After leaving the runway the Bf 110s virtually hung on their airscrew's, their pilots having to exercise a high degree of skill to maintain control, and during the climb-out at approximately 80 m.p.h. the strain on the steel cables increased and slackened in a series of violent jerks until the trio of tow planes and their charge leveled-off at operational altitude and speed, the latter being 120-130 m.p.h. In turbulent conditions the Troika-Schlepp was described by tow plane pilots as "hair-raising", and as was to be expected, the test and training programs were fraught with accidents.

Trials with the Troika-Schlepp had been initiated before the completion of the first Gigant, a JU 52/3m standing in for the glider. As a safety precaution the transport was usually towed off the ground with its outboard engines idling, and during one of the earliest tests the "train" had just left the ground when the left-hand Bf-110 tug suddenly broke violently to port. The pilot of the Ju 52/3m immediately pulled the cable-jettisoning lever and gave his idling engines full throttle, but the port cable failed to part company with the transport, and as the pilot of the Ju 52/3m struggled to gain altitude, the trailing cable cut a farm cart in two, demolished farm buildings, uprooted trees, and finally became entangled with a telegraph line. The aircraft was virtually jerked to a standstill in mid air, but the sturdy trimotor remained airborne complete with trailing cable to which was now attached a full-size telegraph pole! Despite this baggage the pilot succeeded in landing the aircraft at Merseburg.

Part of the training program for the Troika-Schlepp included formation take-offs by trios of Bf 110s trailing cables but without gliders in tow. One of the first of these formation takeoffs ended in disaster. At Merseburg when the starboard aircraft veered to port, became entangled with the cable trailed by the center aircraft, and both aircraft crashed. Shortly afterwards, during the first Troika-Schlepp trials in which a Gigant was actually used, the tow planes and their charge had just climbed out of the airfield at Obertraubling, near Regensburg, when the towline snapped. With remarkable presence of mind, the pilot of the Gigant, Alfred Röhm, ignited his unused take-off rockets, pulled the giant glider around in a steep turn, his port wingtip virtually brushing the ground, streamed his braking chute and effected a perfect landing.

On another occasion at Merseburg, the pilot of a Gigant pulled his cable-release at an altitude of 1,300 ft. and promptly banked to starboard to make his landing approach. Unfortunately for the port tow plane his cable had not disengaged, and the Bf 110 was wrenched violently sideways, its rear fuselage breaking off.

Despite the hazardous triple-tow methods necessitated by the lack of a sufficiently powerful tow plane, the test program of the Gigant itself progressed relatively smoothly, although on one occasion during operational trials with a Gigant carrying 120 troops, the take-off rockets under one wing failed to ignite, the glider veered to starboard, its three Bf 110 tow planes colliding, and the entire "train" crashing to its destruction in a forest near the airfield boundary, 129 lives being lost. Another casualty was Otto Bräutigam whose Gigant crashed when water ballast shifted during the first overload trials.

Even when the Heinkel He 111Z became available as a tow aircraft, the complicated procedures needed to put the Me 321 Gigant on its jettisonable trolley, the requirement for long runways and the danger of one of the RATO rockets failing to ignite rendered it almost useless.
 
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