Every now and again, I get a pang of guilt for celebrating military aircraft and ignoring the world of commercial aviation. But as soon as I start reading about modern airliners I start remembering important tasks that need doing, like buying biros or cleaning my shoes.
However, not all airliners are dull — the following would have been extremely beautiful, brutish or decadent- or in some cases all three. Unfortunately they were all destined to be discarded in the overhead locker of history. Keep us going. Keep us independent. This blog can only carry on with donations, please hit the donation button above and below and share what you can.
Every donation helps us- thank you. Choosing number 10 was particularly hard: one of the proposed Northrop flying-wings as seen in the picture above? The Ye business jet variant based on the MiG? The Horten ton transport?
All would have been deserving aircraft but we could only have ten. I hope you enjoy our selection. Sadly nobody was crazy, or forward-looking, enough to build this wonderful machine and it remained firmly on the drawing board. Streaking from city centre to city centre with a top speed twice that of helicopters of the time, the Rotodyne, could have been a major transport innovation. The concept was extremely innovative: for takeoff and landing, the rotor was driven by tip-mounted jet engines.
The engines were connected with clutches to axial compressors in the rear of the nacelles, which had flush inlets above the wing, and the compressors fed the rotor. Thanks to its tip-mounted jets, the Rotodyne was exceptionally noisy, an undesirable trait in a city centre airliner, and was cancelled. On 4 November , John-Moore Brabazon put a small pig in a bin tied to a wing-strut of his aeroplane, to prove that pigs could fly.
