Niftiest Airplane
The Helios
96,863 feet
Very cool. I used to work at Edwards and spent some time poking around NASA Dryden’s (closed, last time I checked, due to 9/11/01) gift shop. They have the original lifting body (the M2-F1) in a hangar there. Now that’s a nifty aircraft!
Welcome to that fertile ground broken by the Gossamer Albatross and Gossamer Penguin. Thank you for the very nifty article.
Another potential use for GA airports.
Grounded purely on people’s reactions to its odd appearance.
Only 14 were ever built. They proved to be fine machines.
I know it was pretty much garbage in service, and that it was deadlier to its crew than to the enemy, but the Me 163 gets the nod from me.
There are new ME-262s under constrruction in the U.S.! The first five are undergoing flight testing. Here’s a pic of one in flight.
Omigosh! 2003 ME-262s. And it started life over 60 years ago as a lowly tail-dragger.
Ringo: The magazine article I read said that Messerschmitt is allowing them sequential serial numbers as well.
This may be a shameless commercial plug, but if you ever find yourself near Hutchinson Kansas, check out the kansas cosmosphere and space center for an SR-71 hanging in the main lobby (always a nifty plane!), and a room with both a V-1 and V-2 from their original packing crates. You can also find the Liberty Bell 7 (when not on tour), the Apollo 13 capsule and the largest collection of Russian space artifacts outside of Russia inside the museum.
Also, for a more out of the way visit to a museum with beautiful airplanes, check out Liberel Kansas (home of Dorothy’s house from the Wizard of Oz) and the Mid America Air Museum. For a small museum in a tiny town, the Liberal Air Museum has some incredible planes and helicopters.
For some great warbirds, stop by the
American Airpower Heritage Museum in Midland Texas. This museum is the headquarters for the Commemorative Air Force (used to be Confederate Air Force). If the CAF hits an airshow near you, it’s worth the price to see the classic WWII planes in the air, including the last flying HE-111 and an ME-109!
The drop-deal coolest aircraft ever built was, without a doubt, the SR-71 Blackbird.
You can see some video of it in flight here.
They’ve been a long time coming. Classic Fighter Industries in New Jersey started the project ten years ago and contracted a group in Texas to actually do the construction. Some problems developed and the project got further and further behind and legal wrangling ensued, stopping construction for a couple years. Finally CFI got control of the aircraft and transferred everything to an outfit in Washington state where it’s finally nearing completion.
Appearantly they’re only planning on building five, and two are spoken for. So if anyone’s got the money (as in a few million bucks :)) you can still get your hands on one. They’re building one seat and two seat versions, as well well as a version that can be converted from one to two seats.
Hopefully whoever buys them actually flies them from time to time. I’d love to see one at an air show…
Eric
That looks oddly like the inspiration to Burt Rutan’s Boomerang.
Then there’s the Convair XF2Y-1 Sea Dart, a prototype for a supersonic, water-based jet fighter. The project was scrapped after a well-publicized crash, and the Navy’s development of supersonic carrier-based fighters.
Yeah, who woulda thought the Sea Dart could fail? A jet powered, supersonic fighter sea plane - it seemed like a natural! 
There were a lot of wacky ideas tried in the '50s. How about the Convair XFY-1 Pogo Plane? Really cool looking and a neat idea.
As I mentioned in another thread, I’ve got a enemy aircraft ID poster of the BV141 from WW II.
Eric
Is the ME-262 really as short-coupled as it looks in those pictures?
I wonder how well it flies?
A friend sent me some pics of the new (proposed?) Airbus 380. From the outside it looks like a flying double decker bus (maybe Virgin will buy one and paint it all red), but the inside looks quite posh.
Well, then there’s the classic.
ShibbOleth, the A380 is the real deal; first flight is scheduled for next September, with certification and first delivery by 2006. Airbus has already received almost 100 orders for the plane.
It’s big. Really big: 240 feet long, 261 foot wingspan, 80 feet high. Maximum takeoff weight is 560 tons. I spoke with an engineer who’s working on the emergency ram air turbine, a propellor-like device that pops out of the belly to provide electric and hydraulic power in case of a total engine failure, and the blades on it are over five feet across-- that’s bigger than the propellor on a small Cessna!
Canadian perspective here: The coolest, most advanced, most beautiful plane ever built (then promptly cut up and destroyed before entering full production by a short-sighted and foolish government) was the AVRO CF-105 Arrow. Truly the greatest triumph and tragedy in Canadian history.
As an aside, there are at least two projects underway right now to recreate the Arrow and fly it by 2009.
Sine the only big big problem with the convair pogo plane was how tricky it was to land, I bet with modern electronics to help it land it could be effective in some role even today, possibly as a tank-buster.