Never knew the Vietnamese produced a fighter plane 
Phat Nom would be a great name for a Vietnamese street food takeaway
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Just seen this:
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From the big book of testicular fortitude;
Columbia 107 towing a broken hover barge for 50 miles across an ice flow in Alaska in 1982.
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Wow! Fwd rotor tips canât be more than a very few feet from the ice - and 50 miles!!
Youâd hope once they got it moving, the helicopterâs attitude could be levelled out a bit but who knows?
I dug up some background on it - the tow line was 600 ft long and the shot was taken using a very long lens, so the aircraft was a bit further off the ground than it looks. Apparently it was about 25 degs nose-down (looks more).
Still very impressive though: they had towed the empty hover-barge 50 miles upwind to a drilling site and were towing the fully loaded (220 ton!) barge back downwind when this pic was taken.
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Thread serendipity lead me to this abomination -
Literally no-one will be astounded to know that it fell-apart killing one of five (?!) pilots the moment it attempted to leave the ground.
âCold-war madness!â you may think - godnose there were enough drug-addled aviation projects during that era - but this barely qualifies, dating as it does from as recently as 1986! 
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Prompted me to watch this again, one of my favourite things on YT.
Sikorsky prize winning human powered flight. 3m up and staying within a pre-set area for over a minute. Fantastic.
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Thatâs fantastic.
It is. You wouldnât think itâd have to be so large to provide the vertical lift needed.
That said, Iâm looking forward to seeing this at some point.
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I worked on those, many years ago.
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Incredibly bit of footage shared on Airliners.net.
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Wow. Incredible !
