Not what the OP was asking, but here is one of the world’s strangest aircraft- the Blohm & Voss BV141. An experimental WW2 design, it is perhaps the most asymmetrical airplane ever built. It apparently flew well enough, but was just too strange for people to accept.
The book “The World’s Worst Aircraft”, by Bill Yenne, Dorset Press, contains photos of many of these early, failed aircraft designs. He also makes the statement "aircraft designers in the years before 1910 didn’t know what airplanes were supposed to look like!. You might find this book interesting. There are several photos in there that look similar to your description.
Regarding the OP, photography was well developed at this time, and even moving newsreel photography, so it’s quite possible that some of this film is real newsreel footage. So you could contact those companies that a previous poster mentioned.
However, I’d guess that the umbrella-cart one and the human-powered flight attempts are probably later re-creations.
I wrote to a friend of mine who is an aviation film historian at one of the world’s top air and space museums, and he forwarded the following info:
I did a little further research of my own on the Sky Car, because as I wrote to my friend, “I had always thought that the Sky Car guy must have been a complete idiot: how could he possibly imagine that shaking an umbrella up and down would create lift? Then I saw one of the rarer outtakes (which you’ve no doubt seen) that shows that it’s not a solid-skinned umbrella, but has leaves that (theoretically) allow air to pass through on the upstroke, then close for the downstroke, while the whole magilla rotates. So it’s not completely idiotic; there’s at least a semblance of a concept in there somewhere. Of course, it looks like the centrifugal force of the rotation prevents the leaves from actually opening on the upstroke. And then there’s the weight of that enormous two-ton engine he’s using to drive the thing. And how did he plan to control it in the air? Or prevent counter-rotation?”
It seems to me that it is part of a longer series of short scenes, which include several shots of locomotive engines in head-on crashes. I think it might have been compiled in the 60’s.
Thanks, guys. I’m convinced that the clips are indeed from Aeronautical Oddities In The News. I’m intrigued, though, as to why these obvious gags and nutcases are immortalized in otherwise serious studies in the history of aviation. Did the researchers putting documentaries together think they were real, or were they just going along with the gag?
I don’t see why you couldn’t have expected them to fly - more wing area should equal more lift. Perfectly reasonable. I second the recommendation for reading “World’s Worst Aircraft”; I found it very enlightening.
Since this thread is back anyhow, I’ll update the NTSB link for the Heli-Stat. It’s kind of confusing. The report is dated in 1980, but there are pictures of it from 1985 elsewhere on the net; I assume it or another prototype crashed again later.
Yeah, in a different thread. It didn’t occur to me that someone would open a new thread to answer one of my questions.:rolleyes:
Seriously, though, I appreciate the info you provided in that thread. Maybe someday the History Channel or someone will do a documentary on the stories of the planes in those clips.