Worst Idea In Military Aviation

These gunner posts:

The FE2b
Royal_Aircraft_Factory_FE2d_gunner.jpg


Or these Caproni bombers...

I'm getting pants-changing vertigo just looking at these... :(
 
On a more modern note, in the early 2000s there was a proposal to quickly transport Marines or other military logistics via giant suborbital spaceplanes.
spacemarines_ss_2.jpg

aXArm9P.jpg

The idea was for a craft to be launched into space a la an extremely upscaled SpaceShipOne sort of method; detaching from a high-altitude mother plane, firing rockets to rapidly accelerate into a suborbital trajectory on a given vector, arriving at the location going through the gruels of re-entry and landing...uh, somewhere, preferably some place where Marines are needed sooner rather than later and on a runway that can withstand a spaceplane. It was also desired to have enough fuel to stay airborne long enough to find alternate landing sites should the first one not turn out.

By doing this, they can skip having to ask countries for permission to cross their territory by going over it instead, saving time that could otherwise be potentially used up in bureaucratic squabbles. The entire craft would be operating on a potential political loophole.

I remember reading this in Navy magazines.

Another link here.

Likely impractical. But this is the wrong, wrong board to find a constituency for saying that suborbital planes disgorging hordes of Marines is anything but really cool.

NB-36? If that was not a piece of atom-punk what was...

That, and the X-6. The sheer number of ways to get a meltdown....
 
The worst idea in military aviation? The F-104A with an ejection seat that fired downwards, sending the unfortunate pilots crashing into the ground... :mad:
A lot of ejection seats at that time couldn't be used at low altitude, whether they were upwards or downwards firing. The idea there was obviously to avoid running pilots into the T-tail, which would have been just as lethal, without worrying about parts of the flight envelope where the seat wouldn't work anyways.

The idea was for a craft to be launched into space a la an extremely upscaled SpaceShipOne sort of method; detaching from a high-altitude mother plane, firing rockets to rapidly accelerate into a suborbital trajectory on a given vector, arriving at the location going through the gruels of re-entry and landing...uh, somewhere, preferably some place where Marines are needed sooner rather than later and on a runway that can withstand a spaceplane. It was also desired to have enough fuel to stay airborne long enough to find alternate landing sites should the first one not turn out.

A "runway that can withstand a spaceplane" actually isn't too much--because of how the rocket equation works, spaceplanes tend to be relatively lighter than airplanes. The Space Shuttle did need a really long runway, though.
 
I think that the German two stage missile A9/A10 was the most wasteful project ever conceived in military aviation.
The project could be seen as a part of military aviation because the upper stage, the A9, was planned to be a winged, piloted missile.

The basic A4 missile already was a massive waste of resources, with more people being worked to death in the production of the missile than being killed by the missile's hits.

With a gross mass of 16,259 kg (35,844 lb), the A9 was to be heavier than the A4 with a gross mass of 12,805 kg (28,230 lb), while carrying the same payload (1,000 kg).

The A10, the first stage, was to be much heavier still, with a gross mass of 69,043 kg (152,213 lb).

But the waste of resources goes much further than these numbers suggest. See this excerpt from the A9/A10 article in the Encyclopedia Astronautica:
Guidance systems of the time were hopelessly inaccurate at the 5000 km range planned for the A9/A10. Therefore it was decided that the A9 would have to be piloted. After cut-off of its engine at 390 km altitude and 3,400 m/s, the A9 would re-enter and begin a long glide to extend the range. The pilot was to be guided by radio beacons on surfaced German submarines in the Atlantic Ocean. After reaching the target the pilot would lock in the target in an optical sight, then eject. Death or internment as a prisoner of war would follow.
So each launch of the A9/A10 combination would mean the loss of more than 85.000 kilogrammes of strategic materials and a highly skilled pilot, as well as making several U-boats much more vulnerable to attacks than they would have been otherwise. I have the impression that other real and projected weapons mentioned in this thread are models of rationality compared to this.
 
Last edited:
I have just found this interesting picture on Military Meshes of a Miles Magister with an articulated wing.
In the early 40's an articulated wing was considered to add bombs and fuel to the limited loads the bombers of the time could carry. Miles Aircraft experimented with this wing design on a Magister. It was unstable and unsuitable. There are no pics of this plane that can be found now even though it was tested for several months. This quick illustration shows what it probably looked like. Pretty, she wasn't.
Though it was unworkable, I am not at all an expert who could say whether this is really one of the worst ideas, or the worst, but I find it worth showing here.

Miles Magister L8326 Articulated Wing.jpg
 
Has anyone already mentioned the infamous "telephone pole" large-caliber cannon that was supposed to be mounted on the nose of the Me 262 Schwalbe ? I always crack up when I see that idea. Compensating for something, indeed.

I think one idea that sounded good on paper but didn't quite work was the German Mistel that used a modified Ju 88 fitted with a warhead nose with a piston-engined fighter strapped on top:

The problem was that flying this combination made the whole thing vulnerable to Allied fighters, and the accuracy of the Ju 88 armed with that warhead at hitting at target wasn't that great, either.

It's still a load of fun in IL-2 Sturmovik. :D
 
Potato, potat - OH CHRIST IT BURNS, IT BURNS!!!



But more seriously - The SLAM, aka Project Pluto. Let's have a unshielded reactor running a nuclear ramjet that circles at Mach 3 for weeks over the Pacific awaiting it's go orders. When it gets its go-code, it's computer, a marvel of the late 50s and early 60s computation, will take over completely, guide it to where it drops its 16 bombs, and then has it do donuts over the smoldering remains of Soviet territory for weeks, spewing sonic booms and radiation. Nothing will go wrong with that....

The shear quantity of terrible movies this thing should have inspired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Missile

There's a least one...
 
Has anyone already mentioned the infamous "telephone pole" large-caliber cannon that was supposed to be mounted on the nose of the Me 262 Schwalbe ? I always crack up when I see that idea. Compensating for something, indeed.



It's still a load of fun in IL-2 Sturmovik. :D
Idea was not so bad. At least Me 410 with same cannon had pretty good kill/loss ratio against heavy bombers.

But definitely love it in Il-2. :D
 
Idea was not so bad. At least Me 410 with same cannon had pretty good kill/loss ratio against heavy bombers.

But definitely love it in Il-2. :D

I think the Soviets and their NS-45 on the Yak-9K takes the cake though. At least the Germans never tried to mount a 45-50mm class cannon on a single engined fighter.
 
Top