When I worked at Edwards AFB I saw a pair of PA-48 Enforcers on the ramp. Never saw them fly though. I thought they were a good idea. Maybe not for the USAF, but for export to countries that needed a relatively low-cost counterinsurgency aircraft.
I originally worked for Kentron, a subsidiary of LTV. When I’d go to the LTV hangars I’d drive by the F-20 Tigersharks. Good aircraft (in spite of a couple of crashes), but the target market bought F-16s instead.
What other aircraft – military or civilian, fixed-wing or not – had potential but didn’t make the cut, and you would have liked to have seen more of?
Just about anything by Bugatti. They caught my eye a long time ago, with their twin engines powering one drive train, and having two propellors, one in front of the other on said train.
I remember a news story about the Tigersharks. It really seems to me that if it is a US made plane, other countries don’t want it if the US military doesn’t want it.
Many years ago when I worked at North American Aviation (late 40s) they came up the F-82 to compete with Northrop’s Black Widow night fighter. It had two Mustang (F-51) fusalages mounted on one wing. Idea was the pilot in the left one, the navigator in the right. One test pilot told me whey he hated flying it: every plane, no matter the size, pivots on the center of the cockpit when it banks. This thing, of course, gave a weird sensation when banking, as one cockpit just rose or dropped, making flying by the seat of the pants pretty odd.
NAA also came out with their first and only civilian plane ever, the Navion I think it was called. Fine plane, but after all those years of making military aircraft, they could not produce it for a competative price. A joke around the plant was that a friend of then-president, Dutch Kindleberger, asked if he’d sell him one “at cost.” Dutch replied, “Gladly, it’s twice the selling price.”
KlondikeGeoff: That reminds me of a Bob Stevens cartoon I saw in There I was…. Two hot-rock fighter jocks had just returned from the ETO and were making a proficiency flight in a B-25. They crashed. In their hospital beds one of them says, ‘My engine was running rough, so I aborted!’
I used to fly over those frequently when they were parked at United Beechcraft at VNY. Very pretty aircraft. Too expensive to buy (around the price of a Cessna Citation or a Lear 31), and performance was inferior to competing turboprops. It’s a shame they recalled them and destroyed them There are lots of overpriced, underperfoming aircraft that people still want and fly.
I always thought the Dornier-335 (WWII German heavy fighter with tractor and pusher propellors) and the VFW-614 (737-esque airliner with the engines on pylons above the wing) were interesting ideas. It’s not that I need to see more of them, I’m just curious about why these ideas were tried, what worked and what didn’t, and why they were never followed up on.
As I understand it, the Do-335 had pitch and yaw stability problems at high speed, and short range due to its weight, but the main reason it didn’t make it was the same reason most German airplane designs late in the war didn’t make it.
The VfW-624 allowed shorter landing gear and provided foreign-object ingestion protection for the engines, but the configuration created greater engine noise in the cabin (without the wing blocking it) and blocked the view for many passengers.
The Beech Starship was hugely expensive to make, and had some late-discovered structural issues that could not be fixed economically. Raytheon bought back all of the production run for destruction, leaving only a few disabled for museums.
The F-82 did get used early in the Korean War because its long range permitted it to be based in Japan, but there was no need for it once the UN forces set up air bases on the mainland. The faster, more maneuvrable, but shorter-range WW2 leftovers were better suited, and then the jets showed up.
Zebra is right about the difficulty of selling a US product if the US military doesn’t buy it. That isn’t only due to nationalism, it has a lot to do with the ability to piggyback off the US military’s innumerable economies of scale. Northrop made a strategic blunder in committing so much of their own resources to the program not only without a US contract but with a US competitor in the market.
For the most part, airplanes fail to make it for very good and usually mundane reasons, no matter how cute they look. In terms of my aesthetic enjoyment of a beautiful-looking design, it’s enough that the beautiful-looking design exists. Making it fit the real world only mucks it up.
There will always be a special place in my heart for the Dornier Do X. It was a mammoth project of the late 1920s, an incredibly ambitious design but doomed from the word go. So big that the technology of the day could never give it the power, speed, or range it needed, it served mostly as a focus point for Fascist sympathizers’ dreams of nationalist glory and a pipedream of a luxurious air-travel future that would never quite arrive.
Another plane that didn’t make it was whatever Amelia Earhart took out over the Pacific. But that’s a different kind of didn’t make it.
Speaking of Amelia, the Lockheed Vega was an interesting concept. One of the comments I once read in abook about flights of the 20s and 30s mentioned that the undercarraige was jettisonable for extra speed, being one of the least streamlined parts of the plane. One thing always bothered me about that statement. How did they land!? Did the Vega have a skid like the Komet or something? Or was that author just an idiot?
The LearFan was another that never went very far but looked pretty cool. One of the prototype mockups used to hang in the (IIRC) Dayton airport terminal.
The era from about 1944 to about 1960 was a wild one in military developmental aviation, with new ideas every couple of months and many projects cancelled after 3 flights of the prototype. For example: http://www.daveswarbirds.com/usplanes/aircraft/flapjack.htm
Personal aside …
The USAF was playing with resurrecting the PA-48 when I was getting ready to go into pilot training. I really, really hoped they’d get it together & I’d get chance to fly the thing. The airplane never came together, although funny enough my career ended up positioning me perfectly to have been a part of it if it had ever left Edwards. Oh well …
How about the F-16-XL? Although the “regular” F-16 definitely made it (at 4300 deliveries to date), this was IMO the coolest one of all. With 27 hardpoints and supercruise*, it was quite an airplane.
The Spruce Goose would have been a great plane if it had gone into production in 1938. It was simply obsolete by the time it actually flew.
Which brings up the subject of those magnificent flying boats and why their time passed. Flying boats were based upon the limitations of mid to late 1930s airplane technology: Few or no airstrips capable of handling anything heavier than a DC3, especially in the third world; prohibitive fuel/cargo ratios for direct transAtlantic flight; and a practical cruising speed between 100 and 200 mph. So to fly across the Atlantic in the late 1930s you took either the northern route (eastern seaboard- Newfoundland- Greenland- Iceland- Scotland) or the southern route (eastern seaboard- Caribbean- Brazil- Guinea Coast- Morocco) with refueling stops at every step. This took long enough that comfortable accommodations were desirable.
By the end of WW2 planes had the range and speed to fly nonstop directly across the Atlantic, and paved airstrips capable of handling heavy four-engine planes were more common. The focus moved away from flying hotels to something that would get you where you were going in a day or less.
The BD-10J would have been fun – if not for (as I heard) the problem with flutter.
I’m not sure the [url=“http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0837455/M/”]Quickie Q200
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counts, but I’ll mention it anyway. Going against its being a failure is that many, many kits were built and are flying. It’ll do 180 mph, and gets 44 mpg in cruise. (By contrast, a Cessna 172 gets about 15 mpg IIRC.) It seats two, and has striking good looks. But in favour of it being a failre, they are no longer made. I don’t remember the details, but IIRC there was a fatal crash, and Quickie Aircraft was sued and went under. unlike the original single-place Quickie that would be built from pans, the Q2 and Q200 were only available in kit form.
