Strange Shapes

The 1940s and 1950s were decades of more experimentation, as designers tried out new wing shapes and jet engines. The 1947 Northrop YB-49 had no fuse­lage or tail plane. It was just a curved wing, with engines, fuel tanks, and crew compartment inside the flying wing. This airplane looked so unusual that some people claimed they had spotted a

PIGGYBACK PLANES

Several designers experimented with the idea of one aircraft carrying another. In the 1930s, engineers tried out the idea with a small seaplane fixed on top of a flying boat. The fly­ing boat took off before releasing its passenger craft to fly on alone. The idea was to extend the seaplane’s range for mail flights by saving fuel on takeoff. A similar idea was tried in 1948 by the U. S. Air Force. A tiny "parasite" fighter was hooked to the underside of a bomber. The McDonnell XF-85 Goblin fighter managed the risky maneuvers of launching and rehooking onto the bomber several times before the project was canceled. NASA revived the piggyback idea in the 1970s for ferrying Space Shuttles across the country on the back of a Boeing 747.

Strange Shapes

О Space Shuttle Atlantis rides piggyback on a Boeing 747 known as the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA).

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UFO or flying saucer. The Northrop designers also tested a smaller flying wing, the XP-79B. It was supposed to destroy enemy bombers by slicing through their tails. It flew once, for 15 minutes, in 1945; the pilot reported it was uncontrollable.

Other oddities included Convair’s F2- Y1 Sea Dart (1953), the only jet fighter with water skis, which enabled it to take off and land on water. Unfortunately, it needed almost a mile of water to take off. Hiller’s Pawnee of 1955—officially named the Experimental Ducted Fan Observation Platform—looked like a table lifted by air jets. A soldier could ride on top of it and fly around the battlefield. It never caught on.

Much experimenting went into mak­ing planes that would not need long runways at airfields. In 1954 Convair tested the turbo-prop XFY-1, which was nicknamed “Pogo.” This plane rested on its tail, facing straight up, for takeoff. The tail-sitting design was tried again in the Ryan X-13 Vertijet of 1955. The British went for a more conventional, horizontal position in the Short SC-1
and Hawker P-1127. These experiments in the 1960s led to the production of the Harrier V/STOL (vertical/short takeoff and landing) jet fighter.

Another strange shape was the 1980s Sikorsky X-Wing. This took off like a helicopter, but its X-shaped rotors func­tioned as fixed wings, making the X – Wing capable of faster forward flight.