10 Fascinating Experimental Aircraft Of World War II

[Gnarly Gnu]

Every time I see one of these lists I find some new amazing aircraft I'd not heard of before. For aircraft design a very creative time indeed.

[pylon500]

The downside to these 'List' sites, is that they are usually full of advertising and pop-ups, that take forever to load.

 

And that's aside from the fact that half these site have wrong or misleading information, ie; the FIRST aeroplane...!

 

But it's hard to resist them sometimes...

 

 

[turboplanner]

You could put a thread up with a thousand pieces of information on the first one which is the Howard Hughes Spruce Goose.

 

I saw it being dismantled at Long Beach and apart from being massive, it has a charisma not unlike the Super Constellation; when you're standing there, you know its not just another aircraft in the evolution of the species.

 

Hughes solved some major problems which subsequently allowed us to have the big passenger aircraft we fly in today, one being to resolve the problem of control surfaces so big that a man didn't have the strength to operate them with conventional lever ratios from the control column.

 

 

[facthunter]

Somehow it looked like it wooden have a big future. Interestingly, the flight engineer was Joe Petrali who was a bit of a good competitive bike rider for Harley D and who also developed the Super X Hill climb BIG BERTHA model. Rode the streamlined "Knucklehead" to set some records too, when it was developed about 1935. Nev.