What are your country's "if-only" aeroplanes?

zoomar

It's hard for Americans to have "only if" airplanes, given our massive defence budgets and tendency to drop gazillions on anything which flys and kills people, but there are good candidates.

This was already mentioned - the Boeing SST. One wonders, what would have happened to the popularity of supersonic travel if the USA had been more open to allowing SST's to fly over the continent and had completed development of its own SST.

B-39 and B-49 Just too cool flying wing bombers

X-20 DynaSoar.

And, of course its not an aeroplane, but carried them - the ZRCV follow on to the USS Akron and Macon.
 

Jukra

As for Finland, here's something radically different. Finnish Air Force has been known for it's top notch fighter pilots during Second World War. The domestic airplane industry was not up the standards, though:

In a happier OTL the Valtion Lentokonetehdas design team is employed more useful way, such as chopping wood, and none of the domestic plane projects will be made, here's some examples.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VL_Myrsky

Out of 51 built, 10 destroyed in accidents. The wooden construction could not withstand Finnish conditions. In top of all, the design was underpowered and obsolete.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VL_Humu

Finnish unlicensed copy of Brewster 239. While Brewster was a brilliant plane for 1941, the VL Humu prototype made it's first flight in 8 August 1944. Fortunately, only the prototype was built.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VL_Pyörremyrsky

Finnish Me-109 look-alike. First flown only in November 1945 as an employment project, I'd guess. Featuring top speed of 620km/h. Overall, it's very nice looking plane with prospect of ruling skies in 1942 or 1943.

The wartime design efforts were, of course, made under difficult conditions but they were completely mismanaged with design efforts spent in numerous directions. If these three projects weren't enough, there were also investigations on how to produce a Finnish Mosquito replica, which, considering VL's project speed, would have been ready for Suez Crisis.

But here's some post-war projects, which continued the sorry wartime saga of trying too much with too little resources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valmet_Vihuri

Domestic post-war trainer, fielded during 1950's. Fielded Bristol Mercury engines left-over from license built Bristol Blenheims. Total of 51 built. The plane had very high accident rate thanks due to underpowered, unreliable engine and difficult flying characters. The planes were used to train a massive reserve pilot force during 1950's when Finnish Air Force fighter inventory consisted of six De Havilland Vampire Mk 52's, later on of 13 Folland Gnats.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valmet_L-90_TP_Redigo

A turboprop trainer nobody wanted. Killed two test pilots when under development. Finnish Air Force was forced to buy it, though it's trainer needs were fulfilled with Valmet Vinka (a good Valmet plane at last, like VL Pyry pre-war trainer) basic trainers and BaE Hawk jets. The planes are in "liaison use", for which they're naturally fuel hogs because of their turboprop engines.

But here's at last, a domestic dreamplane:

Karhumäki Karhu-48, a good, advanced sports plane for it's time (1948) which did not get into mass production.

http://www.museo24.fi/?action=INavigation::changeFolder(2727)
 

bookmonkey786

Not technically an airplane more like a cruise missile but how can you say no to nuclear powered ram jet engine :eek::eek:

I give you SLAM (Supersonic Low Altitude Missile) AKA the Flying Crowbar

Not exactly a subtle weapon it had the tendency to irradiate everything it flew over. But dam if it isn't a cool concept
 

Readman

Top choice as mentioned has to go to the AVRO Arrow for Canada that plane getting canceled and destroyed was a purely CRIMINAL act, not too fond of Dief the Chief for that horrible display of ass-hattedness.

sigh....
 

Tony Williams

The two best-known military examples in Britain are the TSR-2 long-range supersonic strike plane and the Hawker P.1154 (a big, supersonic Harrier).

The one civilian/military project I would pick out is the Fairey Rotodyne.

TSR-2 from here: http://www.thunder-and-lightnings.co.uk/tsr2/index.php
logo.jpg


P.1154 from here: http://www.harrier.org.uk/history/history_p1154.htm
1154col.jpg


Rotodyne can be seen performing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9633v6U0wo

And for a fictional - but feasible - one for WW2, try this: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/WW2plane.htm
 

Alexius

Britain is crawling with them, and they've already been mentioned. Greece's aircraft industry is at best rudimentary, but they were about to licence-build the PZL P.24 at the outbreak of WW2- which would have been the only Greek-built manned monoplane.

Unless, of course, you count Icarus- a brilliant project scotched by an accident in testing. If only he'd used glue not wax- or stayed below the design ceiling!
 

FlyingDutchman

Alexius said:
Unless, of course, you count Icarus- a brilliant project scotched by an accident in testing. If only he'd used glue not wax- or stayed below the design ceiling!
Click to expand...
:D
And it was a very modern design for it's time.


The Netherlands had the G-I which was just coming into service when the Germans attacked.
It was a very modern twin-engined long range heavy fighter with a lot of armament.
 

The Dean

FlyingDutchman said:
The Netherlands had the G-I which was just coming into service when the Germans attacked.
It was a very modern twin-engined long range heavy fighter with a lot of armament.
Click to expand...

The G-1 was a superb machine, made of wood like the Mosquito.

fokker_g-1FoukeA1b.jpg
fokker_g-1FoukeA1a.jpg


Fokker also made the innovative D.XXIII

Fouke50FokkerD-1.jpg
Fouke50FokkerD-3.jpg
Fouke50FokkerD.jpg


The Germans captured it in 1940 and Dornier used the same engine layout in the Do 335, the fastest piston engined aircraft of the war.
 

AMF

fortyseven said:
Looks cool.

Avro Aerocar

avrocar-2.jpg
Click to expand...

fortyseven, thank you for your contribution, but in my thread-starter I had written that cool looks are not enough.
What is more important: if I remember correctly, the plane you mentioned could fly no higher than a hovercraft :(, although it was planned to have excellent high altitude performance, as well as VTOL capabilities:rolleyes:.
 

PMN1

The Dean said:
The single most significant aircraft the Miles M-52 The Miles M52 supersonic research aircraft, was within a few months of flying as the world’s first aircraft to ‘break the sound barrier’ when the Government cancelled the contract. Various explanations for the cancellation from official sources were contradictory and conjecture by ‘aviation experts’ over the years did little to clarify the confusion. Even in the late 1990s, when official papers became available under the ‘50 year rule’, in the Minutes of the Government Committee that dealt the fatal blow to British aviation, and Miles Aircraft and Frank Whittle in particular, the ‘facts’ are surprisingly missing.

Here is a picture of a scaled down remote controlled prototype that was dropped from a Mosquito in 1948 and flown at 1,000mph by it's controller in the Mosquito.

m52.jpg


Notice the fully moveable tailplane later used on the Bell X-1 and the North American F-86 Sabre.
Click to expand...

Considering what politicians and airline bosses did to our aviation industry, did we loose anything by it not flying?

:mad:
 

The Dean

Here's another one we casually gave away, this time to France, the Fairy Delta II the first aircraft in the world to exceed 1,000mph in level flight. I can remember as a child on holiday on the Sussex coast seeing, and hearing, Peter Twiss's record breaking flight along the English Channel in 1956.

FD2_SBAC.jpg



It eventually morphed into the Mirage after all of Fairey's data was given to Marcel Dassault.
 
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fortyseven

AMF said:
fortyseven, thank you for your contribution, but in my thread-starter I had written that cool looks are not enough.
What is more important: if I remember correctly, the plane you mentioned could fly no higher than a hovercraft :(, although it was planned to have excellent high altitude performance, as well as VTOL capabilities:rolleyes:.
Click to expand...

You mean examples need to be practical?
 

AMF

Thank you again, everyone, for your contributions.

Jukra, I admire you for going against the grain.

Hendryk, fhaessig, merlin and The Dean, the French and Dutch fighters that you mention seem to have the greatest POD potential of all the planes mentioned so far.
The Dewoitine D-520, the Arsenal VG-33 and the Fokker D.XXIII had a top speed similar to that of the Messerschmitt Bf 109 E and the Bloch MB-157 and the Arsenal VG-33 were superior to it. It would not have been advisable to mass-produce them all, but if one of them had been mass-produced a little earlier than in OTL, it might have helped to stop Hitler's armies in 1940, thereby rendering a service to humanity.

Dewoitine D-520, as used by the Armee de l' air after the liberation of France
d520-large.jpg



Dan1988 and fortyseven, I like the American supersonic transports, and they certainly would have offered a big speed advantage over existing subsonic planes and probably also offered economies of scale over the Concorde. I cannot know whether they would have been commercially viable or how serious the environmental issues would have been, but the advantages they would have offered would have been more than just 'coolness'.
 
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