1932 Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster
10 Likes
Yf22?
It’s ugly in any case
X-32.
Piss off. That’s even less pseudo-English than the F-35A is 
I remember that when it first came out. Was being touted as an ideal spotter plane for the police, guess that didn’t work out.
It crashed while on display to the police, iirc.
I was still in school when those things first flew, and to this day I’m baffled why it never, ever caught on.
Reading the reports, the fatal crash was almost certainly pilot error - no evidence for aircraft issues was found. There’s also a history of sabotage, both financial and physical, which may be coincidental since it’s hard to see how such an outré design could be a commercial threat to anything.
Thing is, it can do 90% of what a chopper can do at 10% of the cost of one with the size and loiter-time to undertake spotter/pursuit roles, and for way less fuel consumption. I guess it was before its time in 1979 - 42 years later UAVs have taken-over the role.
It looks like a helicopter accidently reversed into a turbo fan engine…
I like it.
The Horten Ho 229, late WW2 German prototype fighter/bomber. First flying wing powered by a jet engine.
4 Likes
Where’s that Rob?
Would love to see one in the flesh.
It’s a model/render.
No idea mate, cool though innit.
Looks like the bits that there are are all in the NASA museum
I’ve spent 5 minutes Googling and that’s thrown up various plans over the last decade or more for NASA to restore it. But it’s not been long enough to find out how far they’ve actually got, or not got, with any work.
1 Like
Always wondered where they intended to mount the cannon on those things if they’d managed to make them flyable (true FWs without computer-assisted stabilisation are tricky, to say the least). Nose was full of pilot, anywhere near the intakes risked smoke ingestion, so out on the wings, which makes shooting a matter of getting convergence right, which in turn makes the pilot’s life even harder…
Fascinating thing, but its replacement was already on the drawing board apparently by War’s end -
[Gotha Po G-60 - ‘it’s just a model’]
Cheers, t’other Rob.