Such as the BV 141, which reportedly performed well, but was never put into service.
It’d be interesting to see if the concept drawings that go before congress are deliberately created to be “Cooler”, “Sexier”, and more futuristic-looking than the way the aeronautics company knows the plane will look in the end (due to engineering factors, cost factors, and basic common sense stuff).
Only meth-addled Nazis could think that thing looked good.
I’m really glad the US never built this thing…the air intake is not supposed to go there. I don’t give a shit how it may have performed, it’s just not meant to be!
The English Electric Lightning is an odd bird, looks sort of like an F-8 and a MiG-21. I’m sure it was more useful than the F-35 Lightning.
I recall reading an article in 1999 that said that the F-117 would have been less visually visible if it were painted a light blue rather than black, but the USAF didn’t do that because it was considered too sissy a paint scheme, and painted them solid deep black instead because that looked good - and that that black silhouette made the jet MORE visible at night when backdropped against clouds, and that that was one reason it was easier for the Serbs to see it by eye during Operation Allied Force.
So it appears that aesthetics do play a small role.
Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if Boeing’s big happy-mouth grin jaw engine intake for its X-32 was one reason it lost the JSF contract to Lockheed - but then again, Boeing did advance further in the contest than any other non-Lockheed competitor.
The Boeing prototype was so heavy they actually needed to take the inlet scoop off for it to take off. Since airplane designs inevitably get heavier as development proceeds and problems get fixed, it might never have been feasible. That, and the use of jet exhaust for hover lift at the forward end, instead of the Lockheed “salad shooter” fan, made hot gas ingestion into the engine a serious problem even with the scoop. So the decision would have been the same even without aesthetics.
Photos of the X-32 do often seem to be chosen from its least attractive angles, in fairness.
Bullshit.
Aircraft are symmetrical for roughly the same reason that Wheels are.
The do not work otherwise.
Asymmetric airplanes do increase a designer’s problems by requiring force and moment balances, in all flight conditions, to be dealt with about three axes rather than two, but they have been designed successfully, if mostly as stunts. The Bv-141 was already mentioned, the NASA Scissorwing, and the Rutan Pond Racer all flew, and there have probably been others.
Just to be picky, even light singles and non-counterrotating twins aren’t perfectly symmetrical either - engines are often angled slightly to one side to reduce control problems due to P-factor or engine-out situations.
No one has mentioned wind tunnel testing of mockups, let alone computer simulation testing and ultimately flight testing. These are done for a reason, and the reason is determine the best aircraft on a very scientific and unbiased basis. As Declan said in post #36; Define the mission, then define the aircraft. I would extend the thought to say: Define the mission, and the current level of technology will help you design the aircraft. (And I readily admit there are several ways to solve any complex engineering problem, but the truism “the most simple solution that addresses all the known variables are usually the best solutions” tends to work very well. [And this always reminds me, what kind of razor did Newton and Einstein use? I believe it was British.])
While twin tails may look really cool and sleek, the reason some aircraft have them is because a single tail directly behind a canopy can easily fall into a “dead spot” where airflow is no longer hitting the control surface of the tail making it useless. In level flight wind passes over the tail just fine, but if the attitude of attack is too steep, the tail falls into the (air flow) shadow of the canopy. Sometimes wind tunnel tests prove the opposite however. In about sixth grade science class we were taught that the round shapes at the top of NASA and ICBM rockets were found to generate less air resistance than pointy tips (like the front end of a Roger Ramjet plane) because the point had wind resistance for a longer length of the rocket. An over simplified example would be a ten foot diameter, seventy foot tall rocket with two different types of design at the tip. A spherical top will have drag for the first five feet (radius of the rocket shaft) then the rest of the rocket will ride in the shadow of that sphere with no more resistance because all of the air is deflected away from the rocket by the rounded top. In contrast, the same rocket that tapers to a point for the top twenty feet or so will have resistance for that whole tapered portion of the rocket, plus more drag on the whole length of the rocket because the airflow is not deflected away from the body of the rocket as it was in the previous example, but rather sort of “clings” to the rocket body due to an aerodynamic effect.
All that to say, testing usually leads to sleeker more aggressive looking design, but sometimes it leads to boring rounded designs. I have a hard time picturing an engineer, or high ranking military officer saying: “Yes, forget that effective design that is aesthetically neutral—deliver eight thousand units of that aggressive looking dud over there over the next decade. Oh, and by-the-way, better give me a hundred of those ones that work better too, you know- in case we actually have a war or something.”
My view is that aside from paint schemes (which I do not consider design at all- unless it has a tactical purpose like paint that absorbs radar so less is reflected back to the guys hunting you) “cool looking” military aircraft are only manufactured by Mattel and Matchbox, or perhaps by animated advertising campaigns (I seem to recall Joe Camel used to pose next to fictional aircraft in flight jacket and aviator glasses on billboards all over town).
Now some stuff that has probably been addressed twenty times while I have been typing this. Let’s see: Bi-lateral symmetry, flight stability, high performing ugly planes & poor performing sexy planes, competitive designs
Airplanes, like the human body, are only symmetrical in one of three dimensions. If you cut them top to bottom (front to back on the body) through the long axis, the two sides are mirror images of each other and that does contribute to stability in flight and equal response to control inputs to left and right (or starboard and port). But if you cut them through the long axis in the other direction, very few planes would be identical in profile and they would all be dissimilar looking at the top and bottom longitudinal sections or looking at the top half and bottom half from the ‘outside’. Of course, cross sections would be very different; unlike the Chevy Corvair, the front and back look very different. If you took a cross section of ANY aircraft and mirrored either end and put it together you would have a plane that could never fly. Wouldn’t matter if you created a plane with two tails and no cockpit, or one with two cockpits and no tail—it would be very odd looking and never be able to fly (even if you dropped it off a cliff).
I am not sure why symmetry was mentioned, either as an element of beauty or as an element of flight performance. The only perfectly symmetrical thing I know of is a sphere (like say a cannonball) which is not known for either beauty or aerodynamic flight, but is known for simplicity of design (aesthetics), and ballistic flight (the antithesis of high performance aerodynamics).
In post #32, ElvisL1ves mentions flight stability, and that is a very important part of any tactical platform. It is much easier to hit a target from a smooth platform that is not bucking and yawing and rolling. Now any plane that is liable to flip over or go into a spin is not a good gun platform, difficult to fly, requires constant attention to just stay in the air, and is going to kill more of OUR pilots then it is going to kill their pilots. But a very stable, smooth flying airplane is going to be slow to respond to attack and is vulnerable. Tactical aircraft need to be designed so they can be flown straight and level with little difficulty for long periods of time (to get to the battle- especially if they have to avoid certain airspace), then they have to be able to flip and spin and jinks which requires a design that pushes it closer to ‘unstable in level flight’. What the mission is really does inform how the aircraft is designed, but there are always compromises. Planes that go really, really fast do not necessarily twist, turn, bank, and fire well in a dog fight. The trick is to design a plane that can get there quick enough to intercept the enemy, be capable enough to beat the enemy and stop the attack, and fuel efficient enough to get there and back on the fuel they can carry. In almost any design, when you increase one of those capabilities—you diminish one or both of the others.
During the Vietnam era, the F4 was THE airframe. All of the flying services used it as their primary tactical platform. I have been told it didn’t do anything extremely well—but it did do everything. Air to air, air to ground, electronic jamming, refueling, attacking air defense missiles, played three instruments, tap danced, and it could bake a pie which is more than you can say about some sharp shooters.
One beloved plane in the US arsenal which is not a beauty queen is the A-10. They named it the Warthog for good reason, but it has been praised as the best close support aircraft ever created. Also, you can shoot it with a tank round and it will survive and continue flying. Nothing sleek or sexy about that plane except for how it performs. I suppose one could say it is the exception which proves the rule and you’d get no argument from me. I am told all of the planes in the US inventory are fairly easy to fly too. That way we don’t need to score in the top two percent on the SAT to qualify to fly one. A good airplane design is also one that can be mastered by most adults who are properly trained.
The services are chock full of experimental planes that never even made it past taxi runs. Many of them are beautiful, powerful looking duds that are long on style but short on substance. Chuck Yeager refers to them as Hanger Queens, poorly designed and in need of constant service and upkeep. Many of them were too complex and not durable enough for actual field conditions. But they were good enough looking to become some general’s or some admiral’s pet project and prototypes were built. In most cases fortunately, the system worked and the good looking but poorly performing plane never goes into production. (Speaking just for myself- the F-35 is a dog. It looks all tough, and every service flying it will reduce unit price and all. But the best thing about that plane is that it looks similar to the vastly superior F-22. I would rather be defended by two F-22’s and a slingshot than be defended by a dozen F-35’s. There is no way to make a 22 Carrier capable, but we would have been a much better defended nation if they had built more of those and never adopted the 35.)
Okay, I fell asleep at the computer last night, and woke up to the above. Only one more thing I wanted to mention. Because of our system of procurement, and because of intellectual property rights and attitudes—we can’t always just add new technology to a competitor and hybrid a best possible design. New innovations are proprietary information first of all. Second of all, the competitive bid process is a winner takes all contest. All aircraft (and possibly missile) companies are invited to submit plans. Most will pass, some will offer to provide their engines or air frames or avionics in a package to a bigger player. Even small companies may build parts for the successful design eventually. Some designs are probably eliminated when it is all “on paper”, or possibly after some computer simulation testing. The eliminated companies may offer elements of their design to the survivors. Eventually it comes down to two competing designs. Both will probably get contracts for a prototype. Those will be tested extensively, both by the manufacturing company and the military branch seeking the platform. Negotiations will take place and one will be adopted at a certain price (which will overrun before a single plane is delivered). The other is tossed aside like a one night stand. The non-selected company will hold on to any innovative designs or concepts to put into future prototypes. There is no mechanism (short of the government declaring the new technology property of the state for security reasons) for the procurement agency to say: “We like this one, but want to incorporate this, and this, and that from the other design. That contributes to institutional similarities too. Most services buy primarily from the same one or two manufactures which already have an institutional design style. So several Navy platforms built by Grumman will look similar, but different from several Air Force platforms built by McDonald Douglas. Of course this is old information; both of those companies have been swallowed whole by other companies now. In fact most of my interest in the field is at least twenty years old. Running very late this morning (slept in a chair last night), no time to review—please forgive any obvious mistakes or misstatements that are just errors; but feel free to persecute the ideas relentlessly.
Despite the numerous contrary assertions in this thread, I think the OP’s observation has some merit. Take the Hawker Hunter – if you look at the Wikipedia entry, you’ll find:
Of those, roughly contemporaneous and designed for the same mission, only the Saab has vaguely similar aesthetics to the Hunter.
Or the Avro Vulcan:
Planes are designed for a purpose, and that dictates their appearance. Up to a point, there are only so many options for a particular wing shape, so planes tend to look alike.
Jet fighters these days tend to be designed to top out at about Mach 2.2. After that you run into heat problems. One of the fastest fighters was the BAC Lightning.
The British and Israelis emphasize protection over speed, although most MBTs are pretty fast anyway. Angular turrets? That is because they use Chobham armor or some variation of it, which can only be made in slabs.
Small arms depend greatly on their intended purpose, but within a general category they all look fairly similar.
All the aircraft listed date back to a period when there was more experimentation and more variety. For example, nose intakes have gone out of fashion, so have engines in underwing pods. Modern fighters all look relatively similar.
This is an ‘eye of the beholder’ thing again though, personally I always found the YF-22 kind of bland and ordinary, and the YF-23 as a much more exotic and aesthetically pleasing design.
I’m certain that as aeroplanes are designed by human beings and people being people while taking everything else into consideration if they can make it aesthetically pleasing then they will.
I don’t remember the Pond Racer being asymmetric. Could you be thinking of the Rutan Boomerang?
Dorothy Parker had something to say about the role of aesthetics in military aircraft design:
“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.”
No one, I’d imagine, wants to be the person who decided to procure a particularly ugly aircraft.
Also, as long as we’re talking about asymmetric Rutan-designed aircraft, the Scaled Composites ARES is slightly asymmetric and, IMHO, more beautiful for it.
It was developed for close air support, a role that has an “ugly” precedent in the A-10 Warthog. But I (and many others) find the A-10 beautiful in its utter commitment to the idea that form follows function.
Yeah, you got me. 
Unless they used to be NASCAR drivers
Or pilots in air races. “Go fast. Stay low. Turn left.”
The A-10 isn’t symmetrical either. The rotating cannon barrel is offset to the side so that the barrel that’s firing is on the centerline. That reduces aiming problems from recoil-induced yaw. It also has a pitch trim offset that kicks in when the firing switch is closed, to counteract the nose-down pitch caused by recoil from the low-mounted gun.
Not just for fashion, but for radar placement - the nose is the best place for it. Nose-intake designs either came before radar, or had draggy pods added as afterthoughts.
What fighter are you thinking of with podded engines? They just don’t work on supersonic aircraft, if that’s what you’re thinking, but they’re the optimum for subsonic noncombat aircraft and most airliners.
I suspect there is a certain amount of conformation bias in aesthetics of this sort. Nowadays there are many people who consider the A-10 to be a good looking jet - perhaps because since the A-10 *does *exist and it *is *in the Air Force inventory whether one likes it or not, it just grows on people over time and so they habituate to it and think it looks better and better.
From aerospace/military message boards (not the most scientific of samples,) the overwhelming majority opinion seemed to be that the YF-23 was much more exciting and futuristic while the YF-22 was stodgy and boring.