Great design blunders

A warm and festive welcome to all who join me in the “Design Blunders that entered service” thread.

Here are a couple of fundamentally flawed designs to start us off. It defies believe that these aircraft actually made it into service:

Bolton & Paul Defiant, UK, late 30s.
A ‘modern’ monoplane fighter but mounting a 4x.50cal turret aft of the pilot. Quite aside from massively degrading performance to be poorer than many of the bombers it was designed to shoot down, this configuration meant that it had no forward firing guns….. droves got shot down in the early days of the war.


Vigilante, US, late 50s
A would-be supersonic nuclear bomber whose flaw was to eject the nuclear bomb out of the tail cone into the slip stream… which didn’t work. Also had a poorly designed engine maintenance access which meant that it took up loads of deck space. Role was change to reconnaissance and it is generally a popular aircraft despite its obvious shortcomings.

The square windows of the original De Havilland Comet deserve a mention.

Would the Napier Sabre also come under design blunders? A tremendously powerful sleeve valve engine

www.eagle.ca...

fitted to both the Tempset and the Typhoon, which had a nasty habit of cutting out mid-dive, often without the pilot having any time to recover power.

[edit on 26-12-2005 by Englishman_in_Spain]

[edit on 26-12-2005 by Englishman_in_Spain]

The bolton paul defiant found massive success later on in the war as a night fighter - even more so when equiped with one of the first airbourne radar sets!

Even so, planeman is right in his assertion that it was a design blunder, that it later found success doing something other than it was designed to do is a credit to ingenuity

My design blunder, for the moment, is the Me 163. On the face of it it was a brilliant and far sighted attempt to put a high speed interceptor to good use, however in its execution it was a terrible cock-up.

Using a take off trolley and a skid instead of a normal undercarriage, more than one 163 was destroyed on take off by its own trolley bouncing back up and hitting it. The unthrottleable rocket engine meant that it was always either going too fast to fight effectively, or gliding, and which bright spark decided to install fuel tanks where the highly volatile fuels could freely mix together if the aircraft became inverted?

The accident loss rate of the Me 163 was so high that many more of them were lost this way than the number of allied aircraft they shot down, some allied pilots called the Me 163 "Our best fighter"

At the risk of offending out UK Aviation cliqe, the square windows on the DeHavilland Comet and the resulting accidents pretty much killed of the UK's commercial aviation sector (untill its partnership with Airbus)

Ooops sorry Englishman_in_Spain I did not see you had posted this as well

[edit on 12/26/05 by FredT]

The English don't find the truth offensive Fred, thats your mob

I think the Brits are quite open about our cock ups, after all, we've had so much practice.

Here's a group candidate; the Bright sparks who who were ingenious enough to recognize the value of huge transport aircraft in the mid 1940's but were too dim to consider how they might viably and economically power the things, take a bow Hughes Hercules, Bristol Brabazon, Convair XC-99, Saro Princess and Lockheed Constitution

Originally posted by waynos
Using a take off trolley and a skid instead of a normal undercarriage, more than one 163 was destroyed on take off by its own trolley bouncing back up and hitting it. The unthrottleable rocket engine meant that it was always either going too fast to fight effectively, or gliding, and which bright spark decided to install fuel tanks where the highly volatile fuels could freely mix together if the aircraft became inverted?

I thought they were vertically launched, or was that just the prototypes?

And at least one pilot died by being eaten alive in his seat by the highly corrosive fuel leakingi nto the cockpit before take-off. Yuck!

How about Der Furher's brilliant move of putting a bomb rack on the Me 262?

Or the really wierd idea of having a glider bomb towed by the Me 262?

Hey, Boulton Paul Defiant is equalled almost exactly by the Me 110 twin engined fighter, known as the Zerstorer (destroyer), the only thing the Me 110 did was destroy its squadrons during the BoB. Like the Defiant it became successful only as a nightfighter equipped with radar and forward/upward firing, mid-mounted machine guns called "Schrage (with an umlaut on the a!) Musik", "Bent Music"! Unlike the Defiant, the schrage musik guns were immobile.

How about the Japanese Ohka suicide plane – a small rocket aircraft which was launched from a bomber (typically a “Betty”). The type is attributed with three vessels sunk but generally the losses, particularly of the launch aircraft, were ridiculous. A number of factors for this not least the supremacy of American code breaking, but some blame does lie in the design.

Howlrunner, the Me 163 was never launched vertically, maybe you are thinking of the Bachem Natter? That took off vertically like a missile and was armed with a battery of unguided rockets in the nose, at the end of the flight the pilot and engine both parachuted down and the rest of the aircraft was 'disposable'.

Not only was this design mental, but the British tried to revive the idea with the Fairey Delta 1 in 1948!!!!!!

Someone in the air ministry must have had some sense slapped into them as the FD.1 was actually flown as a completely conventional research aircraft and never recieved its rockets.

Waynos

Yes, that sounds correct from the mental images of photos I'm remembering...

How about the first US jet by Bell? After the P39 Airacobra proved slow and unmanouverable against the Zero, the US decided to let Bell develop their first jet, the Airacomet. The first jet aircraft, a fighter design, could only manage 404mph.

The allies already had prop aircraft that could do better than that.

The Gloster Meteor could do 415mph (at high/low altitude) and the Me262 could manage better than 500mph by the end.

Luckily Lockheed came along with the Shooting Star.

Originally posted by waynos
My design blunder, for the moment, is the Me 163. On the face of it it was a brilliant and far sighted attempt to put a high speed interceptor to good use, however in its execution it was a terrible cock-up.

Ahh, but for being the first aircraft built for transonic aerodynamics, I cannot call it a blunder, sure alot of the design was crap, but alot of it was pure genius too!



I dunno what my no.1 design blunder is, I'm going to have to think about it... maybe the original T-10 (later redesigned to be the Su-27)... hmmm

The worlds fastest turboprop aircraft is the Soviet Tupolev Bear Bomber, Its top speed is about 650ish MPH, Just think if it went 200mph faster it would be supersonic!

It is totally unbelievable, look at the size of it too!

www.flightcraft-simulations.co.uk...

upload.wikimedia.org...

www.ausairpower.net...

www.aeronautics.ru...

www.todo-aviones.com.ar...

www.bharat-rakshak.com...

Remember seeing a Hawker Hunter whizz past in an Airshow, thinkin the Bear Bomber would be capable of the same thing since its speed compares to the Hawker Hunter

Who the hell designed those engines?







[edit on 28-12-2005 by Browno]

And some A-4 Skyhawk stuff:

www.skyhawk.org...

www.skyhawk.org...

www.flybyaviation.com...

www.warbirdphotos.net...

And the Tu-95 and A-4 are design blunders, how exactly

Also, the Hunter is 200mph faster than the Bear, the Bear is however comparable with the Me 262 and DH Vampire in respect of speed.

Originally posted by waynos
And the Tu-95 and A-4 are design blunders, how exactly

I was thinking the same thing...

Here's a little tale of two bombers, showing a remarkable similarity of thought between two of WW2's leading aircraft companies;

In the late 1930's Avro and Heinkel were both designing new strategic bombers that were extremely sound airtcraft but coincidentally both suffered from the same achilles heel, coupled engines.

In Germany two DB601 v12 engines were coupled to a common crankcase to form the DB610 engine to power the He 177, back in the UK Rolls Royce made the same blunder by mating two Peregrine V12'S to form the Rolls Royce Vulture X24 engine. This was then installed into the Avro Manchester. Both bombers were an unmitigated disaster for their respective air forces with engine fires and mechanical failures being commonplace.

Amazingly both manufacturers also hit upon the perfect solution to this nightmare and the Vultures replacement with four Merlins made the Avro Lancaster one of the very best bombers of the war, likewise the four DB601 powered He 277 wasa truly brilliant aeroplane but the difference here was that the RAF bought Lancasters by the thousand while Goering was a crack head. Overall I think thats quite a remarkable parallel.

I would have to agree on the Tu-95 which was almost as fast as the B-52 and the A-4 was quite a skilled design and preformed rather well for such a small a/c


One of the bigger design blunders revolves around the F/A-18. The reason you always see the a/c with external tanks is that when they redesigned the the precourcer to the F-18, the YF-17, they forgot to increase its fuel storage thus the F/A-18 A-D has a really small fuel fraction. Thats a huge blunder

Waynos, Goering was more of a smack guy BTW.

[edit on 12/28/05 by FredT]

The Vought F-7 Cutlass Naval Fighter was deffo a blunder, It had accidents landing with its exaggerated front landing gear, engines underpowered and was totally re-designed altogether. It served only a few years in USN service.

It had 2 engines, two tails, one pilot, and was a tailess design copied from WW2 German designers.

Was the first two tailed jet fighters and design led to other two tailed aircraft such as F-14s, F-15s, F-18s and so on.

Nice aircraft, shame it was a faliour ,looks like a 'Mini F-14 Tomcat'!

Was replaced in 1957 by the F-8 Crusader

Could have been re-designed with front canards, new nose leg, supersonic engines etc.

Temporarily replaced Navy F-4 Phantoms in the Vietnam war early 1970s?

Is there such thing as an F-7D Cutlass with 2 seats?

www.fiddlersgreen.net...

Other cancelled designs:

Republic XF-103 Thunderwarrior

XF-108 Rapier



[edit on 28-12-2005 by Browno]

I can't believe that nobody has mentioned the XB-70 Valkyrie!




The XB-70 was originally designed as a Mach 3+ bomber that would be used to drop nuclear weapons on our Cold War enemies the Russians.....cancelled after the prototype crashed, among other reasons. The Russians designed a few of their aircraft to specifically shoot down this plane, just look at the MiG-31.

One of my favorite planes of all time, even more impressive up close.

[edit on 28-12-2005 by BlackThorn311]

Originally posted by Browno
The Vought F-7 Cutlass Naval Fighter .......Was the first two tailed jet fighters.

*cough* Heinkel He 280, 1941, DH Vampire, 1943 *cough*