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The pilot who crashed the lifting body that later appeared on the Six Million Dollar Man was Bruce Peterson not Bill Peterson. You might have been thinking of Bill Dana, who was another pilot of the lifting bodies at that time. I was fortunate to interview both pilots after they retired and still have those recordings.
My dad was an Englishman who was a trained pattern maker/ model maker in the shipyards of Sunderland/Newcastle. All the yards were closing down in the sixties, so he was recruited by Northrop Aircraft in California. We all emigrated with a few wooden crates to start a new life, He worked on the lifting body. A brick designed to float to earth-helped with the future space shuttle design.
@@StevenHoman Oooh, I don't know... I suppose the LeO 45 was reasonably conventional... though admittedly only just squeezes in at the latter end of 'Inter-war'.. 😅
One of the test pilots who flew the x24b was Francis Scobee, who went on to become a shuttle astronaut and ultimately lose his life as the Commander of Challenger when it was lost. RIP.
My first day in Air Force technical school my instructor said "if you put enough thrust behind it you can make a toolbox fly. That doesn't mean it's a good idea." That would be the one thing I remember 35 years later.
16:18 CuriousDroid states that the F35B remains "the only jet powered VTOL multirole aircraft in service today". Which isn't true, as of the publication of this video the Harrier is still in service with the USMC, as well as the Spanish, and Italian navies.
The harrier isn't really multirole though, it's for close air support. Could never dog flight with other fighters or fill an area denial or air superiority role
@@716monk Yes it is multirole, the Sea Harrier acquitted itself very well in the Falklands, including against Mirages and Skyhawks, downing 20 Argentine aircraft for no losses. It may be outdated, but it is a multirole aircraft. It's in the first paragraph of the Wiki page on the Harrier II.
@@VigilanteAgumon They're all in the same family with similar capabilities and roles. First paragraph of the wiki on AV8-B states it is deployed on multirole missions. The USMC may use it mostly for ground attack but this is the only fixed wing aircraft of Spanish and Italian navies, what do you think they only perform ground attack? Clearly not, Curious Droid is wrong, no need to white knight him.
The M2-F2 pilot was "Bruce", not "Bill", Peterson. And his accident resulted from the extra few milliseconds of decision time added when he saw the helicopter in his landing area. Bruce had already begun his landing flare when he saw the helicopter, and briefly considered jinking to left or right to miss it, but decided to go straight ahead. He lowered the landing gear, but that tiny extra moment of reflection allowed the vehicle to drop a few extra inches, and the gear door on one side caught, and dug into, the desert floor. The pilot induced oscillation had nothing to do with the accident, by the way. Bruce told me the whole story himself in a meeting I held with all of the remaining lifting body people, back in the late 1990s. Oh, and the X-24B... it actually was the X-24A, converted from a clumsy-looking flying potato to a sleek delta dart by adding what they termed "the glove", a flat-bottom pointed delta planform structure into which the X-24A was dropped without modification (other than removing the landing gear). They dropped the X-24A not because of producibility issues, but because it was an absolute dog of a flying machine - the worst of all of the lifting bodies. In it's X-24A redux, it became the hotrod of the lifting bodies, fast and fun to fly. The overall favorite of all of the pilots was the HL-10, or rather its reworked version, the HL-10A. It was the easiest to fly of all of the lifting bodies, with the added advantage of being able to do a gear-up landing if needed.
@@Steven_Edwards I totally disagree. Elon has made the progress he has by thoroughly researching everything that has been done, and hiring the best of the best people who did the right things. I've known and worked with Elon in varying capacities since 2005, and my wife (also a rocket propulsion engineer) knows where he obtained his key engine technologies - and he didn't invent them. Nevertheless, he has invented things that no one else has ever invented.
My favorite example of "looks entirely wrong, but flies beautifully" is the weird asymmetrical Blohm & Voss 141. Imagine the American P-38, but missing one of the engine/tail booms.
@@harveywallbanger3123 That's what makes it so great! Especially since the things that you'd expect from a ship builder making airplanes (BV 222) didn't fly until a year and a half later!
I was travelling the USA back in 2000, I ran out of money while on the west coast… I got a gardening job for this cool old fella… turns out he was involved with the Lockheed XFV. He had pics etc in his garage. Lovely guy.
Anything designed by Bert Rutan, they don't look right but they really fly well. I recall a story of when the beech starship project ended one of the beechcraft executive saying we will no longer be trying to sell a plane that "looks like a Klingon battlecruiser."
@@darylmorning I agree with you, I found the comment funny, so I remembered it. The Starship and the Long EZ, are very polarizing with pilots, they either love them or think they are too weird and do not like them. I think they are classics.
@Owen-mt4si I agree on polarizing. I also think a release now with modern material science, avionics, and the modern mindset would rake in money. It could be redesigned to be under the type cert limit and take the GA world by storm! Or if they'd allow kitbuilds, I'd take that too.
The Lunar Landing Research Vehicle is even more insane than the RR flying bedstead. It had the jet engine pointing downwards to cancel out 5/6 of Earth's gravity, but it also had the rocket engines to simulate a lunar lander. It was slightly safer than the flying bedstead because it had zero-zero ejection seats.
This reminds me of a very old computer game: Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer. While we were given several 'real life' aircraft to use for the challenges such as Max altitude, etc. there were also a few others which were either completely theoretical. Regardless he always had something to say concerning each of them - some less flattering than others. :P
Chuck Yeager's Air Combat was a killer combat flight sim in the 90s. If you screwed up a mission, Chuck would come up in the debrief screen and tell you about. Being told you suck by Chuck Yeager was a pretty good motivator to get better.
My father worked at Sperry Gyroscope (making the guidance module for the Blue Steel missile) and took me to the Farnborough Airshow a few times and I saw the Short SC1 demonstration flight in 1960... when Britain was great at aerospace development.
While I understand that heat sensor technology is better than ever, I'm still sore that we're not going to see another evolution from the Harrier's design. I loved that thing, and always give credit to UK engineers for being unhinged enough to chase that particular idea when nobody else would.
They all complained about the danger, and for good reason, but I think that test pilots today would probably secretly love to fly those missions over a lot of the avionics and nav test points, e.g. "Flip every switch in 50 different sequences while flying in a racetrack for 3 hours and see if anything unexpected happens"
Very enjoyable presentation, Paul. I could watch content about unusual aircraft all day. One of my favorite weird aircraft was the Zimmer Skimmer which served as the concept for the Vought V-173. Special mention to the Stipa-Caproni, which looked like a flying sewer pipe.
Rutan Boomerang is my favorite. It is asymetrical and looks weird but actually flies symetrically - turns both directions the same, unlike many symetrical looking aircraft.
9:0 There are two types of landing’s in high performance aviation, a good landing and a really good landing. In the good landing the pilot can get out of the plane by him self and walk away, in a really good landing you can use the plane again 😁
There's something amazing about planes built around a powerful beast of an engine. I heard the same thing about the Mig-21, it being pretty much the engine with some tiny wings on it to make the pilot believe it's a plane and not a rocket.
I remember seeing some of these in model competitions and never knew their history or their place in aviation history. Thank you for the information, and also, thank you for mentioning the test pilots. We forget the bravery of these men and the sacrifices so many made.
Even mainstream jet planes seem to have not enough wing relative to their mass. The pregant guppy and beluga especially. If you drop something in air like a leaf or a parachute, it needs considerably more area.
That's because they're only moving very (or extremely) slowly through the air, whilst the Guppy / Beluga are moving several hundreds of miles per hour. Lift is proportional to the airspeed squared, so an apparently very small wing area can support many times the weight.
If you halve the effective wing area, and keep everything else the same (including weight, which in reality would be lower with smaller wings), you only need to go around 40 % faster to get the same lift, for the same lift coefficient. If you accept a bit higher induced drag from a slightly greater lift coefficient (i.e. the wings are "working harder"), you could easily get away with only needing 10-20 % more speed, despite half the wing area. The non-linearity of it, and the hidden factors, make wing area a deceptive measure.
Great video. And for part 2, 'cause you HAVE to....... Convair XFY-1 Pogo, CanCar-Burnelli CBY-3 Loadmaster, Vought XF5U-1 “Flying Flapjack”, Saunders-Roe SR.53, Northrop-McDonnell Douglas YF-23 Black Widow II, North American YF-107A. I'll look forward to this.
I googled the "CanCar-Burnelli Loadmaster" and Google gave me a giggle fit by throwing an accidental burn at the plane in the form of "Did you mean *CanCer*-Burnelli Loadmaster?"
Don't know where I've been for the last couple years since I've watched one of your videos, but I've got some binging to do. I do enjoy your presentation and subject matter. And the sophistication of today's Droids is frankly amazing. I'd have thought you'd HAVE to be human if not for that shirt. (JK - I've always enjoyed your shirt choices too.)
You always come up with a "diamond in the rough" type of information. Growing up in that time was always so fascinating. Thanks Curious for reminding me.
The difference refers to motivation in design. If you make it to look good, it won't necessarily fly good. If you make it fly good, good looks will come on its own
2:03 interestingly, this is the first time I've heard a brit pronounce "trapezoidal" and I wasnt aware that it was such a stark difference to the yank pronunciation.
I liked all the attempts at VTOL jets but to me the Harrier is still the gold standard for VTOL jet aircraft as it was as dirt simple as a VTOL jet could be and there is no waste in the design. (Unless you want to consider the puffer system wasteful as it isn't used in horizontal flight, but it is a minimal penalty and it needs to be there.) It has one engine and its four nozzles are used in every phase of flight. The Yak-38 had two heavy engines that unless it was hovering were basically a giant paper weight taking up fuel and stores capacity. The F-35B has a similar problem. While it only has the one engine it still has the weight of the forward fan and its drive coupling which is dead weight in horizontal flight. (And the rear nozzle, while a marvel to behold in operation, looks like a bunch of failures waiting to happen. Lockheed should have scrapped the B model and looked at the Harrier. "That worked. What can we do to improve on it while sticking to its layout?" Sadly, I think I saw my last Harrier flight at EAA this summer.
Curiously, and I don't understand this in the context of the Cold War, Lockheed worked alongside the Yak-38 team, and the result was a cooperative effort. Highly weird.
@@jpatt1000 more precisely, Yakovlev design bureau was looking abroad for potencial help with financing/selling Yak-141 (formally designated as Yak-41M) that Russia didn't have money to adopt (plus retiring previous carriers designed for Yak-38 and switching to STOBAR carrier that don't need VTOL aircrafts - when it works, which isn't often) and it resulted in Lockheed purchasing their research and development data utilized in development of F-35B, primarily with it's nozzle. By the way, around that time russian ejection seats K-36 were tested as possible choice for JSF program. It was strange time, those early post-revolution years... (Another example of collaboration was joint research of supersonic speeds related stuff using Tu-144 ("Russian Concord") as platform)
@@depressedTrent Ah! This was.probably after the fall of the Soviet Union then when Yak was doing stuff like selling their aerobatic planes at EAA. I still remember when an An-124 brought two of them to EAA for a week! They came in a few days early and were letting people up for tours of the 124. My dad was in the copilot's seat and I was in the pilot's seat (I was 13/14 at the time) when one of the Russians came up and I started to get up. He patted me on the shoulder to sit back down and then just reached across me and then we started moving! We were only getting towed but I still tell people I got a ride in an An 124!! Always hoped the 225 would've made an appearance but sadly no...
The F35 seems to be working fine so far, not sure why you’re suggesting lockheed make a cooy of the harrier instead. A lot less crashes than the harrier so far, too.
I always love seeing the Bugatti 100P in videos. I got to met the crew building one near Tulsa, Oklahoma a few years before a fatal crash shelved the project. Absolutely gorgeous plane.
Thanks for the episode. 1. Blackbird 2. Harrier 3. Eagle 4. Raptor 5. Eagle 6, B-1B 7. Falcon (saved my teams assas). Cant wait to see the new sub orbital jet they just tested go into action. Thanks again for the episode.
Oh no sir, the Harrier is gorgeous in forward flight and just looks _right_ Looks like it's namesake. Hovering looks a little odd, knowing that it's desperately trying to kill its pilot at all times.
My favourite "It looks right........" but it Looked Weird picture, was an Italian inventor who wanted to test the effect of a cowling around the propeller. He was years ahead of his time, because as we know, all jet engines use a cowling. Anyway, I remember this picture where he's sitting on top of this big cowling with a control stick in hand and it dwarfs his size like a 'wart' on an apple. But it flew and gave the results he was looking for.
My favourite looks-weird-flies-well aircraft are the various Rutan-based and -inspired aircraft. The two extremes of that are the Berkut, a two-seat tandem canard with fully retracting gear, Spitfire-style, and up to 300hp driving a constant-speed propeller behind the crew; and the Beech Starship, directly designed by Rutan and boasting the only variable-geometry canard among civilian aircraft, along with a pair of 1200shp PT6A-67A's. 300kts at FL 410 on turboprop fuel fails to suck... though she's a heavy beastie...
I was fortunate enough to be deployed as a Marine on the USS Tarawa. Our Harriers were a dream to watch during flight Ops. Horizontal takeoff and vertical landings.
I'm from Clapham, Bedfordshire, the village where the housing for the workers at RAE Bedford was located. A friends dad covered his motorbike with a water proof silver coloured "bag"...on one corner was the markings "Cover - Tail - Short SC1". I saw it, and a lot of other experimental aircraft as a kid.....including the early Harrier field operation trials in a clearing in the woods at the top of our village.
Rutan's Boomerang would be at the top of the list, imho. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Boomerang The Scaled Composites Proteus is close behind. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_Proteus I've been lucky enough to see both of these fly at Oshkosh!
Growing up around Mojave Airport and Edwards Air Force Base. I grew up watching a lot of aircraft designs that did not look tight, but flew right. At the Mojave Airport a few hangar rows from ours, was a guy who designed an aircraft made from cardboard boxes. It was a lifting body style. It's biggest issue was the high speed to take off.
3 come to mind: Flying wing aircraft that utilized the main body as an additional service, the German asymmetric wings/stabilizer aircraft, and the x-plane that the entire wing was fixed but could be rotated around a vertical axis while the rest of the craft maintained its 3axis stability in flight. Im sorry I don’t remember the names of any of these craft.
The "if it looks right, it'll fly right" concept is a perfect example of human selection bias. Early airplane designers converged on similar shapes that worked well, those shapes became standard and prevalent, and their prevalence reinforced what people thought "looking right".
Great topic! Most drones today with 4 or 6 blades don't look like they should fly properly or be maneuverable at all, but man, can they move. How about a video on aircraft that certainly looked right, but never quite flew right, or at least never lived up to expectations? My vote would be for the Vought F7U Cutlass. It looked seriously cool, but was apparently liable to kill its pilot and nearby personnel.
Great video. I don’t mean to be ‘that guy’ but I think you meant test pilot Bruce Peterson. Still a great job on a cool subject. Keep these wonderful videos coming.
The oddballs prove that aerodynamics has no obligation to please the human eye. Be it sleek and slick or an aching eyesore, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
I love this stuff! I’m glad you mentioned the 6 Million Dollar Man thing. (I often wonder about that footage from my childhood memories.) “X” planes and “V” projects(Germans),development of Russian MiGs and SUs. It’s all so intriguing. The quest to master the sky. You earned my subscription! My favorite, the “Short SC1”. (Just when you think you seen it all, you see something new!) Thank you for sharing. JC : )
I once talked to a USAF pilot when I was a kid at an airshow, and I pointed out how thin the wings were on his plane. I'd been flying C150s as a student. He said to me "If you get it going fast enough, I could fly a coffee table." True story.
To me, the "if it looks right, it will fly right" rule is like the "all sharks are fish" saying-it is technically correct, but it does not imply the opposite, so just like there is plenty of fish that aren't sharks, there are plenty of "ugly" planes that can fly. Not to mention that there's another saying that goes something like "you can make anything fly if you have an engine powerful enough", so I believe that we as a collective have long since accepted that thing doesn't HAVE to look right in order to fly. The more interesting way of disproving this rule would be finding some "right-looking" examples that ended up not flying good at all
When I was a kid WAY back in the day I built a plastic model kit of the X-3 Stiletto. I thought it was the coolest airplane I ever saw. Pretty much still do. It looked fast sitting still and maybe that's why the model appealed to me. I had already read about its shortcomings in a "World's Worst Aircraft" book, so this video wasn't too much of a shock to me.
I would say the Berkut (Su-47) It looks right, flies right, just that nobody was there to pick up the bill. And it has a special place in my heart because of Ace Combat...
One of my favorite subjects, the X-Planes. A beautiful example of engineering, innovation, and design. Favorite that didn't look right but flew well has to be the Grumman X-29. Beautiful forward swept wing design.
07:40 - NASA: "The only way you are going to be able to fly is if you are pulled by a 1963 Pontiac Catalina!" Pontiac Dealership: "Gosh it's busy today!"
The Guppy and Super Guppy transport planes come to mind as something that looks like it has no business flying. The F-117 Nighthawk is another one that looks wrong but flies fine thanks to fly-by-wire. On a related note, the F-16 is a plane that looks pretty much perfect, and you'd think it should fly fine, but it turns out that without fly-by-wire it is totally unstable, although I suppose if you shifted some internal weight forward you could build an F-16 that looks the same and is actually stable.
Somehow right the Balugas don't share the same wtf as the gopping guppies. Western unstable fighters all look top heavy, f-16, typhoon. You can tell, once you know you can see it. They're desperately trying to hit the ground at all times. 😂
Yes, the Guppy could be seen approaching the Airport of Bremen, Germany during the 1980s and you asked yourself: how on Earth can this possibly stay up there in the sky?
07:16 I thought that GENERALLY planes gained some lift because air goes over the top of the curved wing, but these lifting bodies have the curved surface on the bottom. which would seem to create downward 'lift'? Or is it that the lower body is angled so as to push up against the air? Like a wedge?
The XF-85 Goblin parasite fighter was one of the weirdest looking "conventional" jets ever made. It had wings and a tail, and a single jet engine, but was intended to be launched and recovered on a "trapeze" device below the bomb bay of a B-36 ("six turning and four burning") long range bomber -- in order that the bomber could have some sort of fighter defense when it was a thousand miles beyond the range of any fighter then extant.
The lifting body aircraft is definitely my favorite. Its the design that's most compatible with future hydrogen powered aircraft. All that space in the fuselage could be used for the large storage tanks that hydrogen requires. I'll also mention the Otto Celera 500L aircraft that is designed around achieving laminar flow around the fuselage, giving it a sort of elongated egg shaped design that increases fuel efficiency.
A similar phenomenon was experienced with earlier (WW2) prop aircraft. High power dives responded in many cases to forward stick, pulling the aircraft up. Completely opposite of design expectations, within a small envelope of speed.
But that was essentially an aero-elasticity issue where control surface loads distorted the main flight surfaces (mostly elevators > tailplane). So a structural & control system issue rather than an aerodyanamic problem as with flight axis coupling. High mach numbers with conventionally designed aircraft did generally cause pitch-down forces - somethimes excessive and fatal.
An F-15 looked right but after being hit in combat in the middle east it didn't look right at all, having had pretty much all of its right wing blown off. It was successfully returned to base and landed very hot because it was flying on one wing and the lifting body design of the fuselage! There's a video about it here in Googletube somewhere. Worth watching.
The picture on the title screen makes the regular part of my brain say no it can’t fly but the logical part of my brain says it looks like A high speed glider 😅
You need to do video on streamlined steam. The two at the start. The PRR K4s 3768 casings designed by the legend Raymond Loewy. Then the LMS Princess Coronation class in all her glory . Painted in Crimson lake red livery . Stunning machines.
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I did this 3 days ago, sage advice.
The pilot who crashed the lifting body that later appeared on the Six Million Dollar Man was Bruce Peterson not Bill Peterson. You might have been thinking of Bill Dana, who was another pilot of the lifting bodies at that time. I was fortunate to interview both pilots after they retired and still have those recordings.
You beat me to it! But I could've sworn it was Steve Austin
@@wilfred8326 From Detroit. Ex-boxer. His real name was Joey Chicago.
@@wilfred8326 Lol
It was also the inspiration for the Farscape, from the show.
Bill Dana is shown at 9:25 standing next to the HL-10, which he had just landed.
My dad was an Englishman who was a trained pattern maker/ model maker in the shipyards of Sunderland/Newcastle. All the yards were closing down in the sixties, so he was recruited by Northrop Aircraft in California. We all emigrated with a few wooden crates to start a new life, He worked on the lifting body. A brick designed to float to earth-helped with the future space shuttle design.
Geordies immigrating to California? I'll bet there was a massive case of culture shock in your family!
My Thanks! to your dad's contribution to flight.
It helped immensely. A nice story, so did you all remain?
this is very scare, my cat sad
@@Platyfurmany Mom was the Geordie. Dad was from Sunderland. My childhood friends could not understand a word she said.
Didn't look right but still flew? Almost every inter war French bomber.
When greenhouses go to war.
The French copy no one and no one copies the French!
Almost? What was the exeption?
Also the inter-war fighters. One of them looked like a biplane but with one loooooong wing instead of two pairs of smaller ones
My first thought 🇫🇷
@@StevenHoman Oooh, I don't know... I suppose the LeO 45 was reasonably conventional... though admittedly only just squeezes in at the latter end of 'Inter-war'.. 😅
One of the test pilots who flew the x24b was Francis Scobee, who went on to become a shuttle astronaut and ultimately lose his life as the Commander of Challenger when it was lost. RIP.
My first day in Air Force technical school my instructor said "if you put enough thrust behind it you can make a toolbox fly. That doesn't mean it's a good idea." That would be the one thing I remember 35 years later.
16:18 CuriousDroid states that the F35B remains "the only jet powered VTOL multirole aircraft in service today". Which isn't true, as of the publication of this video the Harrier is still in service with the USMC, as well as the Spanish, and Italian navies.
The harrier isn't really multirole though, it's for close air support. Could never dog flight with other fighters or fill an area denial or air superiority role
@@716monk Yes it is multirole, the Sea Harrier acquitted itself very well in the Falklands, including against Mirages and Skyhawks, downing 20 Argentine aircraft for no losses. It may be outdated, but it is a multirole aircraft. It's in the first paragraph of the Wiki page on the Harrier II.
@@Sholto_David The Sea Harrier retired in 2016, and the AV-8B is an attacker, making the F-35B the only multirole VTOL in service today.
@@VigilanteAgumon They're all in the same family with similar capabilities and roles. First paragraph of the wiki on AV8-B states it is deployed on multirole missions. The USMC may use it mostly for ground attack but this is the only fixed wing aircraft of Spanish and Italian navies, what do you think they only perform ground attack? Clearly not, Curious Droid is wrong, no need to white knight him.
@Sholto_David What does the "A" in "AV-8B" stand for? Also, the USMC squadron that use the Harrier are "VMA" as opposed to "VMFA."
My late father was an engineer and pilot in the USAF, One of his favorite quotes was , " well it looked good on paper".
The M2-F2 pilot was "Bruce", not "Bill", Peterson. And his accident resulted from the extra few milliseconds of decision time added when he saw the helicopter in his landing area. Bruce had already begun his landing flare when he saw the helicopter, and briefly considered jinking to left or right to miss it, but decided to go straight ahead. He lowered the landing gear, but that tiny extra moment of reflection allowed the vehicle to drop a few extra inches, and the gear door on one side caught, and dug into, the desert floor. The pilot induced oscillation had nothing to do with the accident, by the way. Bruce told me the whole story himself in a meeting I held with all of the remaining lifting body people, back in the late 1990s.
Oh, and the X-24B... it actually was the X-24A, converted from a clumsy-looking flying potato to a sleek delta dart by adding what they termed "the glove", a flat-bottom pointed delta planform structure into which the X-24A was dropped without modification (other than removing the landing gear). They dropped the X-24A not because of producibility issues, but because it was an absolute dog of a flying machine - the worst of all of the lifting bodies. In it's X-24A redux, it became the hotrod of the lifting bodies, fast and fun to fly.
The overall favorite of all of the pilots was the HL-10, or rather its reworked version, the HL-10A. It was the easiest to fly of all of the lifting bodies, with the added advantage of being able to do a gear-up landing if needed.
Elon and the StarShip team could learn a lesson but are bound and determined to rediscover all lost knowledge and achievements.
@@Steven_Edwards I totally disagree. Elon has made the progress he has by thoroughly researching everything that has been done, and hiring the best of the best people who did the right things. I've known and worked with Elon in varying capacities since 2005, and my wife (also a rocket propulsion engineer) knows where he obtained his key engine technologies - and he didn't invent them. Nevertheless, he has invented things that no one else has ever invented.
My favorite example of "looks entirely wrong, but flies beautifully" is the weird asymmetrical Blohm & Voss 141. Imagine the American P-38, but missing one of the engine/tail booms.
That covers about half of Blohm & Voss’s designs including the BV144, BV155 and BV40.
Those B&V designers had to be smoking something PRIME!!
I know it apparently flew well, but just looking at the BV 141 makes me slightly angry. I can't help it.
@@allangibson8494 And a few Burt Rutan designs as well.
@@harveywallbanger3123 That's what makes it so great! Especially since the things that you'd expect from a ship builder making airplanes (BV 222) didn't fly until a year and a half later!
Woody: Hey, Buzz! You're flying! Buzz: This isn't flying, this is falling with style!
Underrated comment lol
Did Buzz Aldrin crash one of his planes?
@@Cheka__ Never heard about that. But the 1966 NASA T-38 crash did propelled his career to a new heights. Literally.
8:18 Col. Steve Austin was the pilot of the crash aircraft, , they had to Re-build him..
Well, They had the Technology,,
@@andrewdillon7837they could make him better, stronger, faster.....mind you, it wouldn't come cheap....😅
How many implants does it take to cross the line from Bionic to Cyborg? :D
When they approached the crash site they expected him to be stone cold
How much would he cost now ?
I was travelling the USA back in 2000, I ran out of money while on the west coast… I got a gardening job for this cool old fella… turns out he was involved with the Lockheed XFV. He had pics etc in his garage. Lovely guy.
Anything designed by Bert Rutan, they don't look right but they really fly well. I recall a story of when the beech starship project ended one of the beechcraft executive saying we will no longer be trying to sell a plane that "looks like a Klingon battlecruiser."
A pox on that executive! The Starship is one of the best looking plane designed after 1975.
@@darylmorning I agree with you, I found the comment funny, so I remembered it. The Starship and the Long EZ, are very polarizing with pilots, they either love them or think they are too weird and do not like them. I think they are classics.
@Owen-mt4si I agree on polarizing. I also think a release now with modern material science, avionics, and the modern mindset would rake in money. It could be redesigned to be under the type cert limit and take the GA world by storm! Or if they'd allow kitbuilds, I'd take that too.
07:25 "... these planes are designed for subsonic, supersonic, or hypersonic flight" Well, that pretty much covers all the bases.
The Lunar Landing Research Vehicle is even more insane than the RR flying bedstead. It had the jet engine pointing downwards to cancel out 5/6 of Earth's gravity, but it also had the rocket engines to simulate a lunar lander. It was slightly safer than the flying bedstead because it had zero-zero ejection seats.
This reminds me of a very old computer game: Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer. While we were given several 'real life' aircraft to use for the challenges such as Max altitude, etc. there were also a few others which were either completely theoretical. Regardless he always had something to say concerning each of them - some less flattering than others. :P
I remember that game. Supposedly a good pilot could take the Bell X-1 into space...I was not that good.
Chuck Yeager's Air Combat was a killer combat flight sim in the 90s. If you screwed up a mission, Chuck would come up in the debrief screen and tell you about. Being told you suck by Chuck Yeager was a pretty good motivator to get better.
@@RCAvhstape "You dug a hole"
@@randomentity6553 "Maybe you should try an easier mission." Oof, Chuck Yeager says I suck...
My father worked at Sperry Gyroscope (making the guidance module for the Blue Steel missile) and took me to the Farnborough Airshow a few times and I saw the Short SC1 demonstration flight in 1960... when Britain was great at aerospace development.
While I understand that heat sensor technology is better than ever, I'm still sore that we're not going to see another evolution from the Harrier's design. I loved that thing, and always give credit to UK engineers for being unhinged enough to chase that particular idea when nobody else would.
Tangential I know, but DAMN that Bugatti Model 100 remains one of the most beautiful airplanes ever, in my book.
Just checked my book, and yes it says the same.
It's an awful shame the newer copy of it crashed. 😔
Man, imagine being a test pilot and asked to get into an experimental glider without wings.
Will it fly? Don't know. Let's build it and find out. Those test pilots had big brass ones.
I don't know how they managed to enter the cockpits with such humongous balls
unfortunately people did this by accident on a regular basis in the automotive world.
They all complained about the danger, and for good reason, but I think that test pilots today would probably secretly love to fly those missions over a lot of the avionics and nav test points, e.g. "Flip every switch in 50 different sequences while flying in a racetrack for 3 hours and see if anything unexpected happens"
If it looks wrong, it flies left.
If it looks wrong, it won’t fly for long.
Very enjoyable presentation, Paul. I could watch content about unusual aircraft all day.
One of my favorite weird aircraft was the Zimmer Skimmer which served as the concept for the Vought V-173.
Special mention to the Stipa-Caproni, which looked like a flying sewer pipe.
1:03 ah yes, the “Flying Flapjack”
To me the F104 looks like it wouldn't fly because of the tiny wings.
And you are very nearly right!
And as always, that's a problem solved with "more power". *Anything* will fly if you apply enough thrust.
What a weird place to find this guy. Gee, I wonder how an F-104 shaped shotgun slug would perform.
@@simongeard4824 Yet another proof that RFC1925 is not an April Fool's joke but solid advice.
It very often didn't. Not much of a problem when you're on the ground, a bit of a big one when you're at 10,000 ft. or lower
Rutan Boomerang is my favorite. It is asymetrical and looks weird but actually flies symetrically - turns both directions the same, unlike many symetrical looking aircraft.
9:0 There are two types of landing’s in high performance aviation, a good landing and a really good landing. In the good landing the pilot can get out of the plane by him self and walk away, in a really good landing you can use the plane again 😁
Pegasus is an absolute beast.
Harrier was practically a Pegasus with wings and a pilot nailed on
There's something amazing about planes built around a powerful beast of an engine. I heard the same thing about the Mig-21, it being pretty much the engine with some tiny wings on it to make the pilot believe it's a plane and not a rocket.
To source the titanium they had to actually import it from the USSR which was supposedly illegal at the time.
cia set up dummy corporations to obtain that titanium.
I’m sure they could justify it as stealing from the enemy for military purposes with minimal losses
Control systems may just make anything fly. It's just an underrated invention.
And power. It has long been an designer's proverb: 'With enough power, even a brick can be made to fly'.
@@petesheppard1709 yes one can look into Indoors RC 3D flying. Its basically all about power and low weight there.
@@petesheppard1709 see F-4 Phantom
@@petesheppard1709explains why everyone says screw aerodynamics in Star Trek and Star Wars.
@@Tokmurok AND...why let physics get in the way of a good story?? 😉
I remember seeing some of these in model competitions and never knew their history or their place in aviation history. Thank you for the information, and also, thank you for mentioning the test pilots. We forget the bravery of these men and the sacrifices so many made.
as some one that has done lot RC scratch building its amazing how much of the time that "if it looks right, Itll fly right" holds up....
Even mainstream jet planes seem to have not enough wing relative to their mass. The pregant guppy and beluga especially. If you drop something in air like a leaf or a parachute, it needs considerably more area.
That's because they're only moving very (or extremely) slowly through the air, whilst the Guppy / Beluga are moving several hundreds of miles per hour. Lift is proportional to the airspeed squared, so an apparently very small wing area can support many times the weight.
If you halve the effective wing area, and keep everything else the same (including weight, which in reality would be lower with smaller wings), you only need to go around 40 % faster to get the same lift, for the same lift coefficient. If you accept a bit higher induced drag from a slightly greater lift coefficient (i.e. the wings are "working harder"), you could easily get away with only needing 10-20 % more speed, despite half the wing area. The non-linearity of it, and the hidden factors, make wing area a deceptive measure.
Great video. And for part 2, 'cause you HAVE to....... Convair XFY-1 Pogo, CanCar-Burnelli CBY-3 Loadmaster, Vought XF5U-1 “Flying Flapjack”, Saunders-Roe SR.53, Northrop-McDonnell Douglas YF-23 Black Widow II, North American YF-107A. I'll look forward to this.
I googled the "CanCar-Burnelli Loadmaster" and Google gave me a giggle fit by throwing an accidental burn at the plane in the form of "Did you mean *CanCer*-Burnelli Loadmaster?"
@@P3x310 Interestingly she's still around
watching the X-3 and getting ready to make a comment here about the wing being very similar to the F-104 when you brought it up
Ah the X-3 the first US attempt to go supersonic with jet power alone but was never able to while the F-100 easily did just a few months later.
Good to see you back! There were rumors that you were very ill. Nice video too.
Don't know where I've been for the last couple years since I've watched one of your videos, but I've got some binging to do. I do enjoy your presentation and subject matter.
And the sophistication of today's Droids is frankly amazing. I'd have thought you'd HAVE to be human if not for that shirt.
(JK - I've always enjoyed your shirt choices too.)
You always come up with a "diamond in the rough" type of information. Growing up in that time was always so fascinating. Thanks Curious for reminding me.
The saying is frequently misquoted as you have done! The original was 'if it's right it will look right', which is a completely different thing.
Exactly the same, but in an awkward order.
Please explain.
Same but worse
The difference refers to motivation in design. If you make it to look good, it won't necessarily fly good. If you make it fly good, good looks will come on its own
How can something be called a misquote? This has been said so ma h times that it is it’s own quote now… you’re wrong and that makes you mad 😂
2:03 interestingly, this is the first time I've heard a brit pronounce "trapezoidal" and I wasnt aware that it was such a stark difference to the yank pronunciation.
I liked all the attempts at VTOL jets but to me the Harrier is still the gold standard for VTOL jet aircraft as it was as dirt simple as a VTOL jet could be and there is no waste in the design. (Unless you want to consider the puffer system wasteful as it isn't used in horizontal flight, but it is a minimal penalty and it needs to be there.) It has one engine and its four nozzles are used in every phase of flight. The Yak-38 had two heavy engines that unless it was hovering were basically a giant paper weight taking up fuel and stores capacity. The F-35B has a similar problem. While it only has the one engine it still has the weight of the forward fan and its drive coupling which is dead weight in horizontal flight. (And the rear nozzle, while a marvel to behold in operation, looks like a bunch of failures waiting to happen. Lockheed should have scrapped the B model and looked at the Harrier. "That worked. What can we do to improve on it while sticking to its layout?" Sadly, I think I saw my last Harrier flight at EAA this summer.
Curiously, and I don't understand this in the context of the Cold War, Lockheed worked alongside the Yak-38 team, and the result was a cooperative effort. Highly weird.
@@StevenHoman When? During work on the F-35?
@@jpatt1000 more precisely, Yakovlev design bureau was looking abroad for potencial help with financing/selling Yak-141 (formally designated as Yak-41M) that Russia didn't have money to adopt (plus retiring previous carriers designed for Yak-38 and switching to STOBAR carrier that don't need VTOL aircrafts - when it works, which isn't often) and it resulted in Lockheed purchasing their research and development data utilized in development of F-35B, primarily with it's nozzle. By the way, around that time russian ejection seats K-36 were tested as possible choice for JSF program. It was strange time, those early post-revolution years... (Another example of collaboration was joint research of supersonic speeds related stuff using Tu-144 ("Russian Concord") as platform)
@@depressedTrent Ah! This was.probably after the fall of the Soviet Union then when Yak was doing stuff like selling their aerobatic planes at EAA. I still remember when an An-124 brought two of them to EAA for a week! They came in a few days early and were letting people up for tours of the 124. My dad was in the copilot's seat and I was in the pilot's seat (I was 13/14 at the time) when one of the Russians came up and I started to get up. He patted me on the shoulder to sit back down and then just reached across me and then we started moving! We were only getting towed but I still tell people I got a ride in an An 124!! Always hoped the 225 would've made an appearance but sadly no...
The F35 seems to be working fine so far, not sure why you’re suggesting lockheed make a cooy of the harrier instead. A lot less crashes than the harrier so far, too.
I always love seeing the Bugatti 100P in videos. I got to met the crew building one near Tulsa, Oklahoma a few years before a fatal crash shelved the project. Absolutely gorgeous plane.
My absolute favourite aeroplane in this category has got to be the Northrop Tacit Blue.
AND the hopeless diamond, have blue.
I just looked them up. Very interesting. Thank you for your comment as its sparked my interest. And what great names, especially Tacit blue. 👍
I reckon it looks like it should fly okay, just not very fast. But the Bird of Prey looks like it's stalling speed should be dangerously fast.
@@paulreilly3904 - Yes, I’ve always been fascinated by this bizarre aircraft, check out the Boeing Bird of Prey too.
@@robertkeddie - Indeed. It made several successful test flights during the 1980s before being retired to a museum.
I am so very grateful you don’t say “aircrafts”, which is all too common on UA-cam.
He does say it at 8:07.
@@ryanreedgibson nooo
...and "spacecrafts" too.
@@todaystarrI would have noticed
Thanks for the episode.
1. Blackbird
2. Harrier
3. Eagle
4. Raptor
5. Eagle
6, B-1B
7. Falcon (saved my teams assas).
Cant wait to see the new sub orbital jet they just tested go into action. Thanks again for the episode.
-1 x Eagle.
Rhino
Oh no sir, the Harrier is gorgeous in forward flight and just looks _right_
Looks like it's namesake.
Hovering looks a little odd, knowing that it's desperately trying to kill its pilot at all times.
My favourite "It looks right........" but it Looked Weird picture, was an Italian inventor who wanted to test the effect of a cowling around the propeller. He was years ahead of his time, because as we know, all jet engines use a cowling. Anyway, I remember this picture where he's sitting on top of this big cowling with a control stick in hand and it dwarfs his size like a 'wart' on an apple. But it flew and gave the results he was looking for.
The Harrier is still in service, just not in UK service.
My favourite looks-weird-flies-well aircraft are the various Rutan-based and -inspired aircraft. The two extremes of that are the Berkut, a two-seat tandem canard with fully retracting gear, Spitfire-style, and up to 300hp driving a constant-speed propeller behind the crew; and the Beech Starship, directly designed by Rutan and boasting the only variable-geometry canard among civilian aircraft, along with a pair of 1200shp PT6A-67A's. 300kts at FL 410 on turboprop fuel fails to suck... though she's a heavy beastie...
I was fortunate enough to be deployed as a Marine on the USS Tarawa. Our Harriers were a dream to watch during flight Ops. Horizontal takeoff and vertical landings.
I would love to see more of these experimental designs! It is fascinating!
That was neat and the 15 minutes went very quickly. Thanks for sharing!
The 'flying bathtub' resembles a skiff, it definitely makes sense it could generate lift with more thrust given their dynamics in water.
Thanks, Paul! As always a super interesting video
I'm from Clapham, Bedfordshire, the village where the housing for the workers at RAE Bedford was located. A friends dad covered his motorbike with a water proof silver coloured "bag"...on one corner was the markings "Cover - Tail - Short SC1". I saw it, and a lot of other experimental aircraft as a kid.....including the early Harrier field operation trials in a clearing in the woods at the top of our village.
The "Didn't look right" award should go to Burt Rutan.
I'm very surprised he didn't even get a mention.
Rutan's Boomerang would be at the top of the list, imho. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Boomerang The Scaled Composites Proteus is close behind. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_Proteus I've been lucky enough to see both of these fly at Oshkosh!
About the Six Million Dollar Man interdiction, it starts with the B-52 drop launching the HL-10 and ends with the crash of the M2-F2.
Growing up around Mojave Airport and Edwards Air Force Base. I grew up watching a lot of aircraft designs that did not look tight, but flew right.
At the Mojave Airport a few hangar rows from ours, was a guy who designed an aircraft made from cardboard boxes. It was a lifting body style. It's biggest issue was the high speed to take off.
I’d have thought its biggest issue was holding together if the pilot sneezed in it-or worse, got caught in the rain!
Thank you, Paul for this excellent report and great video.
3 come to mind: Flying wing aircraft that utilized the main body as an additional service, the German asymmetric wings/stabilizer aircraft, and the x-plane that the entire wing was fixed but could be rotated around a vertical axis while the rest of the craft maintained its 3axis stability in flight. Im sorry I don’t remember the names of any of these craft.
Love this guy’s videos! Always top notch and super-interesting.
The "if it looks right, it'll fly right" concept is a perfect example of human selection bias. Early airplane designers converged on similar shapes that worked well, those shapes became standard and prevalent, and their prevalence reinforced what people thought "looking right".
Great topic! Most drones today with 4 or 6 blades don't look like they should fly properly or be maneuverable at all, but man, can they move.
How about a video on aircraft that certainly looked right, but never quite flew right, or at least never lived up to expectations? My vote would be for the Vought F7U Cutlass. It looked seriously cool, but was apparently liable to kill its pilot and nearby personnel.
skip the ads boys. 6:59
"The UASF" (10:18) ???
Ya, I caught that too. I had to listen again. We all know he means U.S.A.F.
1:23 Center of photo. I don't think that tiny, blocky white one with the black rectangles would fly very well at all.
That's just an ai artefact left over from top secret aircraft that was in that spot
Great video. I don’t mean to be ‘that guy’ but I think you meant test pilot Bruce Peterson. Still a great job on a cool subject. Keep these wonderful videos coming.
11:06 next time i get into with someone im gonna say shut up you rounded top double flat bottom
The oddballs prove that aerodynamics has no obligation to please the human eye. Be it sleek and slick or an aching eyesore, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Been to Dayton 3x so it's always cool seeing the planes actually fly that I saw for real as a kid
Great vid!
Had a senior mechanic on H-34 helos in late 90s that liked saying, "fly it and watch it".
Nice video. I'd like to see more. This could be quite an entertaining series :)
I love this stuff!
I’m glad you mentioned the 6 Million Dollar Man thing. (I often wonder about that footage from my childhood memories.) “X” planes and “V” projects(Germans),development of Russian MiGs and SUs. It’s all so intriguing. The quest to master the sky. You earned my subscription!
My favorite, the “Short SC1”. (Just when you think you seen it all, you see something new!)
Thank you for sharing.
JC : )
I once talked to a USAF pilot when I was a kid at an airshow, and I pointed out how thin the wings were on his plane. I'd been flying C150s as a student. He said to me "If you get it going fast enough, I could fly a coffee table." True story.
Great video, well presented and informative!
👍👍👍
XB-70 'Riding the Shockwave' - what an Aircraft! Folding Wings, Canards, 6 Engines, Steel Honeycomb, ... just awesome for its time. My Favorite!
This is a great video. It puts me in the mind of re-entry capable space planes. Which has been an interest of mine lately.
Yet another excellent and insightful presentation.
And yet again, no one top your nice-looking shirts.👔
To me, the "if it looks right, it will fly right" rule is like the "all sharks are fish" saying-it is technically correct, but it does not imply the opposite, so just like there is plenty of fish that aren't sharks, there are plenty of "ugly" planes that can fly. Not to mention that there's another saying that goes something like "you can make anything fly if you have an engine powerful enough", so I believe that we as a collective have long since accepted that thing doesn't HAVE to look right in order to fly.
The more interesting way of disproving this rule would be finding some "right-looking" examples that ended up not flying good at all
When I was a kid WAY back in the day I built a plastic model kit of the X-3 Stiletto. I thought it was the coolest airplane I ever saw. Pretty much still do. It looked fast sitting still and maybe that's why the model appealed to me. I had already read about its shortcomings in a "World's Worst Aircraft" book, so this video wasn't too much of a shock to me.
I would say the Berkut (Su-47) It looks right, flies right, just that nobody was there to pick up the bill. And it has a special place in my heart because of Ace Combat...
One of my favorite subjects, the X-Planes. A beautiful example of engineering, innovation, and design. Favorite that didn't look right but flew well has to be the Grumman X-29. Beautiful forward swept wing design.
07:40 - NASA: "The only way you are going to be able to fly is if you are pulled by a 1963 Pontiac Catalina!" Pontiac Dealership: "Gosh it's busy today!"
Great video! Who doesn't enjoy learning more about the X series?
The Guppy and Super Guppy transport planes come to mind as something that looks like it has no business flying. The F-117 Nighthawk is another one that looks wrong but flies fine thanks to fly-by-wire. On a related note, the F-16 is a plane that looks pretty much perfect, and you'd think it should fly fine, but it turns out that without fly-by-wire it is totally unstable, although I suppose if you shifted some internal weight forward you could build an F-16 that looks the same and is actually stable.
Somehow right the Balugas don't share the same wtf as the gopping guppies.
Western unstable fighters all look top heavy, f-16, typhoon.
You can tell, once you know you can see it.
They're desperately trying to hit the ground at all times. 😂
I'd argue that the F-117 actually flies horribly, we've just outsourced wrestling it to a computer.
Yes, the Guppy could be seen approaching the Airport of Bremen, Germany during the 1980s and you asked yourself: how on Earth can this possibly stay up there in the sky?
Boeing's Dreamlifter (a 747 modified for the same purpose) looks pretty wrong, though.
I was always amazed at how the X15 flew so well. With its blocky trailing edges and such.
Love the lifting body designs. I'm a Boomer; I followed the project with grave interest as a youngster.
Of course, “right” is a bias we apply based on experience, so it is fundamental that “right” appearance tends toward “right” performance.
Another great episode!
07:16 I thought that GENERALLY planes gained some lift because air goes over the top of the curved wing, but these lifting bodies have the curved surface on the bottom. which would seem to create downward 'lift'? Or is it that the lower body is angled so as to push up against the air? Like a wedge?
The XF-85 Goblin parasite fighter was one of the weirdest looking "conventional" jets ever made. It had wings and a tail, and a single jet engine, but was intended to be launched and recovered on a "trapeze" device below the bomb bay of a B-36 ("six turning and four burning") long range bomber -- in order that the bomber could have some sort of fighter defense when it was a thousand miles beyond the range of any fighter then extant.
The Herrier. Super cool. Cheers from the Pacific West Coast of Canada.
The lifting body aircraft is definitely my favorite. Its the design that's most compatible with future hydrogen powered aircraft. All that space in the fuselage could be used for the large storage tanks that hydrogen requires.
I'll also mention the Otto Celera 500L aircraft that is designed around achieving laminar flow around the fuselage, giving it a sort of elongated egg shaped design that increases fuel efficiency.
At the 10:17 min mark you mis-spoke I think, you say "..the UASF were also interested in lifting bodies.." UASF = USAF ?
A similar phenomenon was experienced with earlier (WW2) prop aircraft. High power dives responded in many cases to forward stick, pulling the aircraft up. Completely opposite of design expectations, within a small envelope of speed.
But that was essentially an aero-elasticity issue where control surface loads distorted the main flight surfaces (mostly elevators > tailplane). So a structural & control system issue rather than an aerodyanamic problem as with flight axis coupling. High mach numbers with conventionally designed aircraft did generally cause pitch-down forces - somethimes excessive and fatal.
I was totally expecting him to point out that every one of these designs ended up with features learned from it that went into the F-35.
An F-15 looked right but after being hit in combat in the middle east it didn't look right at all, having had pretty much all of its right wing blown off. It was successfully returned to base and landed very hot because it was flying on one wing and the lifting body design of the fuselage!
There's a video about it here in Googletube somewhere. Worth watching.
The picture on the title screen makes the regular part of my brain say no it can’t fly but the logical part of my brain says it looks like A high speed glider 😅
First time I saw a Harrier was at an airshow at NAS Jax. Incredible! Incredibly loud, too.
You need to do video on streamlined steam. The two at the start. The PRR K4s 3768 casings designed by the legend Raymond Loewy. Then the LMS Princess Coronation class in all her glory . Painted in Crimson lake red livery . Stunning machines.
I thought Sean Lock was dead, yet here he is narrating this video.