He might be better remembered for inventing the telephone, but Alexander Graham Bell played a pretty big part in the early days of aviation.

He might be better remembered for inventing the telephone, but Alexander Graham Bell played a pretty big part in the early days of aviation.
In the 1970s the US was looking at fielding large numbers of cheaper carriers and they wanted a VTOL fighter to go with it. The problem was the design chosen for development, the XFV-12, couldn’t get off the ground.
When the American’s were coming up with the F-22 Raptor, the Soviet’s were busy devising their own fifth generation fighter. And though it ultimately came to just a single prototype, the MiG 1.44/42 remains one of history’s great “what-ifs?”
The Fantrainer was an attempt to get the flight characteristics of a jet out of a basic trainer by using a ducted fan propulsion method.
It might look like a whale, but the Beverley provided critical air support in some of the post-WW2 conflicts that shaped the world today.
Unfortunately, the very last example may soon be going to the scrapyard.
What do you get when you leave an OV-10 and an O-2 together on a sultry, tropical night? Something that looks like the RTAF-5, one suspects.
While Italian fighters of the Second World War really do tend to get overlooked, IMO, the Caproni Vizolla’s are just about unknown!
The P-47 certainly made it’s mark, but it isn’t so well remembered that one example was the fastest piston engine fighter ever built!
It might have looked like a Warthog with Syphilis and ruined the good looks of the Canberra, but the B-57G showed the way of the future.
The B-26 was the CIA’s aircraft of choice for covert ops in the 19050s and ’60s. But as they got old, they got a major update, becoming even more lethal.
The Martin Baker MB.5? Westland Wendover? Some of the aircraft here have just faded into history. Some were good planes that just came at the wrong time and so are now barely remembered. And some are just so utterly weird it boggles the mind as to what the designers were thinking!