I was visiting a major news site, and in their links to external “Paid Content” was an article about how a basketball star’s jet was “disgusting”, accompanied by this picture. Having not seen an aircraft like it before, I was curious as to what it was and clicked through to visit the link. As with a lot of clickbait, the advertizing picture did not appear anywhere in the “article”, a slideshow of rich people’s jets.
So, is this a real aircraft? The cockpit looks like that of a helicopter and it doesn’t look very aerodynamic, so my suspicion is that it’s a photoshopped picture, perhaps some Frankenstein’s monster of visual parts assembled from other aircraft.
Well, that was solved quickly! So it’s concept art, and, of course, nothing to do with the article.
I’m reminded of a clickbait photo from a few years back of what appeared to be a woman giving a blowjob - there wasn’t really any other interpretation one could make from it. Needless to say, the picture didn’t feature in the article and had no relation to its subject, which I can’t recall.
You’d be surprised about how bulky planes can be. With a computer and big enough wings you can make quite a lot of things fly.
I suspect the biggest problems with that concept’s airworthiness are that (1) the wings are too short to generate much lift, and (2) the intakes on the outer engines point down, and are likely to ingest all manner of junk from the runway on takeoff.
That’s how it is with clickbait thumbnails: the only picture you’re guaranteed not to see, even if you click through the entire tedious spam-ridden malware mine, is the picture in the thumbnail. :mad:
Is “concept art” the right term, here? When I see that, I think of something that some company is actually considering building, or at least of incorporating elements of it into some other design.
One would think, in the era of “fake news” accusations, that news sites - or this particular news site, at least - would be a bit more discerning regarding the articles displayed on their front page, or elsewhere, regardless of whether it’s an external “Paid Content” site or not.
Which is why I’ve taken to right-clicking on the image (in Chrome) and selecting “Search Google for image”, in order to find out the true context of the picture. In extreme cases when they’ve juxtaposed two images to falsely imply they’re connected, I’ve actually cropped the image in order to search for the two components separately.
It’s concept art for video games, comics, that sort of thing… like a pre-3D-rendered artist’s illustration of the final model. At least that’s what the sources say about him. He’s an illustrator for fantasy games/comics/etc., not real-world engineering.
