Worst aircraft ever built, but can you name them???

[bulldog]

Morning all
Trawling the web yesterday and one of those irritating sidebar things came up about the worst aircraft ever. Had a look and there's not many I could identify. So thats the challenge.
More than 5 is pretty much genius levelI reckon. So off we go

IMG_7663D by Clyde Harden, on Flickr

IMG_7664D by Clyde Harden, on Flickr
Little bit easier that one

IMG_7665 by Clyde Harden, on Flickr

IMG_7666D by Clyde Harden, on Flickr

IMG_7667D by Clyde Harden, on Flickr
The first and only East German Airliner ever produced. Crashed on second flight

IMG_7668D by Clyde Harden, on Flickr

IMG_7670D by Clyde Harden, on Flickr
Was designed to take 100 passengers across the Atlantic. Barely made it off the ground. Crashed again on second flight

IMG_7671D by Clyde Harden, on Flickr
Possibly a bit easier here

IMG_7672D by Clyde Harden, on Flickr

IMG_7673 by Clyde Harden, on Flickr

IMG_7674D by Clyde Harden, on Flickr
Presumably the designer of this had not done his Streamlining GCSE.

So there they are, good luck guys

[viscount]

Well two are easy as the clues are on the picture. The TBD-1 Devastator says so on the tail and the Dresden 152 says so on the nose. Some of the others are Yak-38, PZL M-15, Blackburn Roc (not Skua), Blackburn Botha, of the three US XF-series machines one is a Goblin 'parasite' fighter, one was a Rockwell VSTOL design and other is certainly not my first thought the XF-84 'Thunderscreech'. As to the '3-in-one' floatplane, I'm surprised it even completed one flight. In reply to the comment below the last image, if the streamlining on the nose had been applied to the bow of a ship, rather than an aircraft, it would have been well ahead of its time! Is it just me, or did the designer of the Dresden 152 simply adapt a picture of a B-47 Stratojet to produce his design? That central fuselage 4-wheel undercarriage must have taken up a big chunk of passenger cabin space when retracted.

Well that is my offering without consulting 'Wikipedia' - not in the right order, how well do you do sorting them out? The really obscure answers are still there to be discovered.

Not really sure that the Yak-38, Blackburn Roc or the Douglas Devastator truly deserve to be in a 'Worst aircraft ever' listing. I'd put in the Avro Canada jet airliner, the ATL-99 Accountant, Avro Ashton, some of the late WWII German projects. Any others?

[Deleted]

Not really sure that the Yak-38, Blackburn Roc or the Douglas Devastator truly deserve to be in a 'Worst aircraft ever' listing. I'd put in the Avro Canada jet airliner, the ATL-99 Accountant, Avro Ashton, some of the late WWII German projects. Any others?

Please allow me to tell you a story about the Yak-38. During the time that I was doing the 125 certification programme in Russia, I discovered that one of their team had been a Yak-38 pilot. He was a sociable chap, who spoke good English and over a few beers one night, we got to discussing the Harrier, and by extension the Yak-38 - it does not need Sherlock Holmes to work out where the inspiration for the design came from. Their biggest problem though, was that there was never enough power in the engine(s) to allow it to hover successfully. I once remember Bill Bedford describing flying the Harrier as 'working like a one-armed paperhanger'.

Anyway, he told me that they went out into the middle of the Black Sea with the Admiral Kuznetsov,(this was in about 1987), the Soviet equivalent of the Ark Royal. It was fitted with a ski slope, so the Yaks (these were the higher-rated 38Ms) had no problem getting airborne from the carrier. The problem came with the hover. Apparently it was able to hover the deck of the carrier reasonably well, (it had two engines, rather than the Harrier's single engine), but when it went out to sea, it couldn't. The Yak-38’s designers had observed that if one of the engines went u/s, the other would spin the aircraft over on its side. To protect the pilot, an automatic ejection system was designed to detect any changes in pitch and immediately eject the pilot at an angle away from the carrier’s forecastle. He said that on more than one occasion, the system was triggered accidentally, with predictable results! As he described it, two of them fell in the sea, at which point the carrier returned to port. There was much head scratching and engine tweaking and a few months later, the exercise was repeated, with the same results, except that in this case, they lost three aircraft, one of which was being flown by the chap I was talking to. In each case they managed to fish the pilots, (but not the aircraft) out of the water. An edict was issued by the Soviet Navy that, 1) This was not to be spoken of; and 2) that all such operations were to cease with immediate effect.

I mentioned that I had seen one at the open-air collection at Centralnii Airfield near central Moscow and he said that it was one of the few which had survived. Those which had not succumbed to Davy Jones's (or maybe Sergei Ivanov's ) locker had been swiftly broken up. It seems that for some reason, there simply wasn't enough power in the engine to allow it to hover over water. I am neither an aerodynamicist nor a powerplant engineer, so I can offer no further explanation, except to say that he had been made redundant from the navy and now found himself working in the certification office of the MInistry of Civil Aviation!

[bulldog]

Fascinating story about the yak.

Pretty impressed Brian that you knew the Baade 152.aka Dresden

[bulldog]

The list of these types that were given is as follows;
PZL M-15 Belphegor
Yak 38
XF85 Goblin
Lockheed XFV-1 Salmon
Baade 152
Rockwell XFV-12
Caproni Ca 60 Noviplane
Blackburn Roc
Blackburn Botha
Douglas TBD Devastator
Finally that famous!! LWS-6 Zubr Its Polish.