Hell yeah !
That’s a seriously shit-bringing machine
Not a plane but contra-rotating rotors ON A HELICOPTER!!!
Ka52 alligator
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There’s not enough rampant asymmetry in this thread so the Blohm & Voss Bv141 has turned up to complain;
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I was just trying to find exactly that.
I saw one of those in a faraway place that had been landed with the wheels up - basically slid along on the chin and bottoms of the intakes and didn’t even catch fire - one tough airframe!
They repaired it and flew it out about 6 months later; the pilot gave us a nice impromptu display once he’d completed the test flight too 
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When the answer is “just because we can”, we invariably head back to 1950s America. There, people actually got paid to take a perfectly sensible late-first generation fighter jet - you know, the sort of thing that had long-since laid the prop-driven fighter to rest - and they put a prop on it…
And that one prop was to be powered by a compound pair of Westinghouse J38s with an output not far shy of 6000hp - driving a shaft…
The result was a swept-wing aircraft with a 12-foot propeller which even when it was feathered at tickover had the tips rotating at Mach 1.1 
Old Skule turbojets are noisy bastards, 2x turbojets = 2x noise, add in the long, wonky (turbulent) jet-pipes of the era and you have a recipe for an incredible row - yet that is as nothing compared with a permanent sonic boom, never mind 3 of them on a 3 bladed prop, oh yeah, and cavitation noise too…
The result was a plane - the Republic XF-84H “Thunderscreech” that could be heard 25 fucking miles away! - a plane that made people working on it or near it very ill indeed, a plane that caused seizures and sickness, never-mind deafness, and a plane that could shake to bits the instrumentation in a nearby control tower…
I’ve even seen it asserted that the impossibility of hearing radio instructions on the ground meant that the tower used light signals to communicate with the test pilots…
But even that was by no means its worst trait, because it was incredibly fucking horrible to fly, and deeply unreliable - every single part of it went wrong, all of the time, most especially that batshit crazy prop and its pitch gearing…
No-one ever had the courage to test its performance envelope to the full, for the very good reason that it would have shaken itself to bits and they would have died, so it certainly never got near its designed top speed of 670mph, either…
The underlying reason for all this was the very narrow performance envelope and fickle ways of early turbojets - very slow throttle response, flameouts under acceleration/deceleration/rain/&c, slow thrust gain, inefficiency and just plain bad implementation bedevilled them - and what you can get-away with on land you sure as fuck can’t on an aircraft carrier - hence props hung-around longer in various navies… But not this one!
Why was it asymmetric? ~6000hp through a single prop = insane torque bias, so everything from tailplane to intakes were skewed to try to compensate. So while it’s not its most immediately obvious characteristic, it’s a lopsided fucker too…
Amazingly one still survives, albeit obviously not in running form! Even more amazingly, the other survived to be scrapped rather than smashing into the ground…
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The insanely fast Dornier DO335
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Republic must have been on the 'shrooms at that point because they were also working on the (magnificently named it has to be said) Thunderceptor;
The premise was simple enough. In order to go get those Commie bombers, the Thunderceptor took off under jet power. Once in the sky, the pilot pulled the nose up, hit a button lighting up four rocket motors that got you up to altitude and intercept speed faster than any jet only aircraft of the day.
In theory anyway.
In practise, test pilots found that hitting the big red button generally resulted in;
- The Thunderceptor catching fire
or - The Thunderceptor blowing its own tail off
Neither of which are truly ideal in combat. Those mad looking reverse taper wings (which did, in fairness, work brilliantly in their designed intention of improving low speed behaviour) also dicked about with the aero so, by the time that the Thunderceptor wasn’t catching fire, it was no faster than aircraft without rocket motors. Weirdly, like the Thunderscreech, one Thunderceptor still exists.
One of those still exists at the Smithsonian. When it was sent to Dornier AG in the seventies to be restored, German technicians were… interested… to discover that the explosive device in the tail that was intended to blow the tail and rear prop off to allow a pilot to bail out without being turned into pink mist was still primed and active and had been so while the aircraft had sat on display 
.
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How did it take us so long to have this thread?
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Was thinking the same thing! I never knew there was such a treasure trove of airplane knowledge on the forum. To an early airplane enthusiast who’s sadly not read much about the topic as he’s progressed through adulthood, the thread has proven to make for the most delightful reading, rekindling my interest in it all.
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B.Eng. (Aeronautical) here. And used to be civil spotter. Lovvely place this thread.
It was only a one hour bicycle ride to Schiphol airport, but as a school boy almost a month work washing cars and saving pocket money to have the Fujifilm or Kodak HR 400 films with 36 exposures developed and printed.
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Bristol Brabazon. Cancelled.
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In the mid to late 80s I was a regular ‘commuter’ from Gatwick to Edinburgh on these
In the days before Easy Jet you used to get cooked breakfast on the flight!
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Quickest way to convert fuel to sound we’ve ever invented 
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Big fuck off jet engine with seat, wings and some steering. Not the most good-looking but overload charisma! Absolutely outstanding.
Went to a few air shows with my dad in the 70s and these always stole the show.
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Mmmmmm…I dunno 
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