I remember seeing AirTruks operating as a kid too, they'd drive the ground truck in between the tail booms and fill it up with fertilizer through a canvas funnel. And some of the airstrips they operated out of were truly hair-raising, more ski jumps carved out of the side of a hill with a D4 than anything else.

For ugly aircraft, look up French pre-WWII military aircraft, things like the Amiot 143 (yes, that's a real aircraft, not an AI hallucination) or almost anything that Farman made, "let's put wings on an aviary!". I think the 143's main defense was that Bf110 pilots would be so distracted either boggling or laughing they'd forget to fire at it.

50 knots rotation is perfectly fine for a plane that size. A Cessna Skyhawk is certified to rotate at 55 knots fully loaded (and since the stall speed is around 40knots, for specialty take-offs like soft fields it's much lower, 50knots is more than enough).

You are off your rocker dude; the Belphegor is weird, but certainly not ugly. You want certified ugly? You'll find it under the synonym DFW T.28 Floh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DFW_Floh

here is a great video documentary on the m-15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlyO9cJ8hiQ (Alexander the ok: PZL Mielec M-15: One of the Aircraft of All Time)

I have a lot of fondness for the AN-2 that this airplane aimed to replace.

That is, as well, an ugly plane, but once I parachuted out of one a couple of times, it grew on me.

I'll raise you the Blackburn B-54 [0] and the Fairey Gannet [1].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackburn_B-54

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairey_Gannet

I was half expecting to see the SNECMA C-450 'Coléoptère' in the article, with its office-tea-trolley wheels:

https://altitudepost.com/the-plane-without-wings-what-happen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleopter

I don't know, it's kinda slick looking - if you ignore the pylons.

That image made me smile. Yeah, it would be bad at being a plane with poles attached to it like that. I'll see myself out now

> Airplanes seem such a complex, standardized, full of red tape and elitist thing that such stories of hackers starting to pull random beams together and you get a thing that flies are pretty inspiring...

As a kid, I was introduced to the concept of ultralight[0] aircraft when me and a couple of friends stumbled upon a wreck of one in a field. Our parents realized it had to have come from the local place a few miles away. If your aircraft qualifies as ultralight, you do not need a license to fly it. A family friend of my parents had one that he'd roll out to the street, attach the wings, and take off, and then land back on the street, remove the wings, and roll it back into his garage.

These things were essentially go-karts with wings.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight_aviation

The red tape and standarization is only proportional to the liability, making things fly isn't all that hard.

One thing my son has always been obsessed with was planes. We started with paper planes, mainly the classic squarey one I learnt in school that has good balance of speed/airtime and tolerance to launching speeds and angles.

But he got bored and wanted more. We got deep in the rabbit hole of purely paper folding planes (and rockets), with regular visits to Ojimak[0] for more ambitious projects (they're 3D, glued, yet actually flying paper models).

Our latest endeavours involve keeping large Amazon delivery boxes to later take measurements, calculate weight balance, and creating airfoils by stacking several layers of cardboard in a tapered way to make gliders to throw outside (over 1m wingspan!).

In one of our walks we saw a man trying to put order in his garage; it was literally overflowing with home made RC planes, some were copies of standard designs, some quite unorthodox and some just plain head-scratching weird. We talked for a bit, he didn't even have technical background, and I was sold. Obviously it gets more expensive in terms of time and money, but I can't wait for my son to be old enough to dedicate time together in this direction.

[0] https://ojimak01.ehoh.net/hanger.html

The Guppy is very ugly, but I think the Optica is quite nice — the large duct is a bit ugly, but the rest of it has good lines

The cockpit projects from the ducted fan?! That’s certainly a design.

If you invert what people's expectations are for aircraft, you'll get a lot of detractors.

Some like the Long-EZ, some see a face only a mother could love.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_Long-EZ

This is mentioned in the article:

> But the airplane never became popular—although it became briefly famous when a heavily made-up example starred in 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

It was designed to carry to operate from very rough "airstrips" which is a very optimistic term for "a paddock that the farmer hopefully mowed recently and if you're lucky, they also removed most of the bigger stones".

I also imagine in the postwar WW2 antipodes, steel was a lot easier and cheaper to access, as well as work.

Steel alloys have better fatigue properties than aluminum. Many of us in aerospace would happily use a corrosion-resistant steel if not for the weight.

That was a prototype.

Update: I guess the final design also used steel.

> The pilot is above both the engine and the load, and is surrounded by a steel tube truss for maximum safety.

Best part is no part