Top 10: The Ugliest Aircraft ever made

Aerodynamics and beauty are generally in harmony, which is why there are many rather attractive aircraft.

Lurking in shame at the back of the hangar, however, is a whole menagerie of grotesque flying machines. We went in search of ten of the ugliest and found we were falling in love with these characterful, often unorthodox, freaks of engineering.

10: Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II

As soon as aerodynamics ceases to be a designer’s priority, the looks of an aircraft go out of the window. With the A-10, rather than the lowest possible drag, a lot of thought was put into survivability. Huge efforts were made to enable the A-10 to soak up gunfire from the ground and survive to fly home.

Perhaps the oddest feature of the A-10 is the mounting of its twin turbofan engines in pods above the rear fuselage. This placing reduces their chances of being shot or in the case of engine fire, the risk of a fire going from one engine to the other. It does however look a little goofy.

The thick unswept wings with multiple store racks are designed for endurance, and manoeuvrability at low speed, the carriage of many weapons and strength, they are clearly not designed to be beautiful. The twin vertical tails ensure a degree of redundancy in the case of the destruction of one, as well as shielding the engines from infra-red sensors from some angles.

The A-10 is only at number 10 as many (this author included) appreciate its tough purposeful looks. It may not be pretty, but it is utterly distinctive and has an appearance as formidable as the aircraft itself, which has proved an effective anti-tank and Close Air Support aircraft, and as such is beloved by US Army soldiers - if not always by the US Air Force that operates it, which regards it has hopelessly obsolete.

9: Burnelli UB-14

Looking like an AI fever-dream, the Burnelli UB-14 was a bizarre, and extremely ugly, aeroplane that first flew in 1934. Its bizarre appearance has been likened to a giant harmonica held between a set of barbecue tongs. It was designed by Texan aircraft designer Vincent Burnelli (1895-1964).

Vincent Burnelli created his first aircraft in 1915. His initial attempts to sell a military biplane fighter aircraft failed but one was purchased by the New York City Police Department making it one of the earliest police aircraft. He then proceeded to make a series of highly unorthodox aeroplanes.

Most of the lift in a conventional aircraft is generated by the wings, with the sausage-like main body or fuselage contributing far less. The inherent wastefulness of the conventional layout has drawn some aircraft designers, including Burnelli, towards ‘flying-wing’ or ‘lifting body’ configurations which either do away with the fuselage or make it from an aerofoil section that contributes to the lifting effect.

An extensively modified version of the UB-14B design was built under licence in the UK by Cunliffe-Owen Aircraft, as the OA-1 Clyde Clipper (pictured). Only one Clyde Clipper was built, which initially failed tests due to an excessive take-off run and poor-quality build. It was later modified as a personal transport for General De Gaulle. It was later abandoned in Egypt, and burned during VJ-Day celebrations in 1945. 

8: Boeing X-32

The only experimental aircraft to become an internet meme, the X-32 with its cute ‘grin’, weird friendly shape and overall failure has become a much-loved symbol. It is also perhaps loved for its lack of success, as it was a technology demonstrator for a tactical fighter competition won by the rival Lockheed Martin X-35/F-35 Lightning II.

There are several reasons the X-32 is so ugly, one is its ‘fineness-ratio’, a fancy aviation word that essentially refers to the slimness of an aircraft. Slim aircraft tend to offer better supersonic performance, but the X-32 had other priorities, in the form of both the internal carriage of weapons and taking off and landing vertically, which led to its rather overweight shape.

A strange feature of the X-32B was its mid-mounted engine, this and its method of achieving short take off and vertical landing were reminiscent of pre-Harrier studies by the British aircraft designer Ralph Hooper with its swivelling nozzles. Unlike the Harrier, which had four swivelling nozzles for thrust, the X-32B had only two.

The ungainly humped thick wing carried a good amount of fuel and improved low-speed handling. The proposed F-32 production version would have had more conventional wing of a slightly sleeker form. The gaping jet air intake and truncated nose of the X-32 were another reason some find the aircraft so ugly, though opinion is divided with many finding it adorable.

7: British Aerospace Nimrod AEW. 3

The world’s first commercial jet airliner was the elegant de Havilland DH.106 Comet. With its discrete streamlined air intakes and noble nose profile, it was a beautifully clean machine, but thanks to an ill-fated attempt to turn the Nimrod into a flying radar station it also spawned the horrible Nimrod AEW.3.

Earlier, the Comet had been successfully converted into the brilliant Nimrods MR1 and R1 for Britain’s Royal Air Force, which excelled as maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft. With the RAF desperately in need of a new flying early warning radar station to replace the ancient Shackleton, the Nimrod was a natural choice.

Instead of housing one radar array in a large dish above the fuselage like the American E-3 Sentry, British Aerospace opted for one radar in the nose and one in the tail in grotesque balloon-like fairings. Theoretically, this gave the radars a less obstructed ‘view’.

It was 1980 when the AEW.3 first flew, and the rather limited computers of the time struggled to coordinate and process all the radar data. The AEW.3 was cancelled after £1 billion (around $2 billion at the time) was spent. Later Britain tried to create another advanced Nimrod, the MRA.4, which was cancelled after another £3.4 billion (around $7 billion) was spent. The British just bought the E-3 off the shelf instead, which is probably what they should have done in the first place.

6: Aviation Traders ATL-98 Carvair

Sir Freddie Laker was a British airline entrepreneur, a pioneer of low-cost air travel, and founder of Laker Airways in 1966. Earlier, Laker had the idea of taking war surplus C-54 military transport aircraft, and their inexpensive civil counterpart, the DC-4, and converting them to flying car ferries.

The previous stalwart of the car ferry role was the Bristol Freighter, but by the mid-1950s the profitability of this three-car transport, as well as ever-bigger cars, was making it apparent that something bigger and better was needed. Into this niche stepped the Carvair, and it was ugly as sin.

Having a raised humped cockpit made sense to accommodate the huge swinging nose cargo door, but it left the Carvair with a hideous bulbous nose section, giving it the appearance of an ungainly flying tadpole. It was also given a new tail, larger than the C-54/DC-4.

The new aircraft was designed to carry five average-sized British cars, and 25 passengers. It first flew on 21 June 1961. The aircraft was named Carvair (from car-via-air). 21 aircraft were converted to Carvairs, and of these, a rather alarming total of eight were destroyed in crashes. The characterful Carvair has now retired.

5: Airbus BelugaST

Seemingly possessing a disproportionate forehead, with a swollen sausage of a fuselage, the Airbus Beluga is almost nobody’s idea of elegance. Though not attractive, the Beluga is superb at its intended role of moving outsize wing and fuselage sections of incomplete aeroplanes for the Airbus company.

Airbus is an international company making airliners, and originally owned by governments and companies based across Europe. As such the parts, made at different factories around the place, need to be moved for final assembly. The quickest way is by air, but some parts are too large to fit in standard transport aircraft.

Airbus used to rely on the Aero Spacelines Super Guppy, a heavily modified Boeing C-97/ 377, for their outsize transport needs but as this grew long in the tooth, they designed a new transporter based on their own A300, and able to carry twice the load.

Also known as the A300-600ST Super Transporter, the Beluga first flew in 1994. It can carry up to 40,000kg of freight and has a maximum range of 1025 miles (1650 km). It’s capable of moving objects 39 metres long and 7 metres high.

4: Transavia PL-12 Airtruk

Italian-born aircraft designer Luigi Pellarini was something of an eccentric, and for a long time was fixated on perfecting a flying car. While he failed to do this, he is still known today for his creation of one the ugliest aeroplanes ever to enter series production, the Transavia Airtruk.

The Air Truk, made by Australian company Transavia, was developed from the Bennett Airtruck, and first flew in 1965. It is an agricultural aircraft, which is an aircraft usually used for crop dusting. The Air Truk, though a fine design, is visually confusing to say the least, a mess of unlikely features that baffle the observer.

The Air Truk is a sesquiplane, which is a type of biplane where one wing (almost always the lower) is smaller than the other. The word, which is derived from Latin, means "one-and-a-half wings". The sesquiplane configuration has less drag and weight than a pure biplane.

The machine looks very strange, as the cockpit high perches above the engine and the horizontal tail is seemingly split into two. The PL-12’s bizarre appearance is ideal for post-apocalyptic science fiction, and the aircraft featured in the 1985 movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

3: Stipa-Caproni

A moving fluid, such as air, speeds up as it flows through a constricted section of a pipe. Italian engineer and aircraft designer Luigi Stipa believed he could harness this effect to create a more efficient aeroplane. For his new design he ‘intubed’ the propeller in a duct, creating an aircraft of grotesque barrel-like appearance.

Though the aircraft, which flew in 1932, had fine low-speed handling, was quiet and had a high rate of climb for an aircraft of similar power and wing loading, most of the benefits were cancelled out by the increased drag of the overall shape, and so the concept was not pursued further.

Though not successful, the work informed the ‘motor-jet’-powered Caproni Campini N.1, an early jet aircraft that first flew in 1940. A motorjet is a type of proto jet engine which uses a piston engine to drive its compressor stage.

The Stipa-Caproni looked comical, with an extremely stubby shape more redolent of a cartoon image of an aeroplane than an actual experimental design. Ducted fans did not disappear, later appearing on airships, drones, hovercraft, and other experimental aircraft.

2: McDonnell XF-85 Goblin

In the Convair B-36 the USAF had a bomber of hitherto unprecedented size. Impressive though it undoubtedly was, doubts were tacitly admitted as to its ability to defend itself even with the prodigious armament of sixteen 20-millimetre cannon lavishly distributed amongst nose and tail turrets along with six remotely controlled retractable turrets.

The B-36 was possessed of such enormous range that a conventional escort fighter would be impractical, however taking along a parasite fighter to chase off any hostile aircraft impertinent enough to attempt an interception was an entirely different matter. Hence the existence of the XF-85 Goblin, by a considerable margin the smallest jet fighter ever to fly.

Opinions were divided as to the practicality of the F-85/B-36 combination. Designed by a team led by Herman D. Barkey, who would later oversee the development of McDonnell’s slightly more successful F-4 Phantom, the tiny McDonnell, was an extremely well-executed response to the parasite requirement. Nonetheless, its ability to adequately defend its mothership, or even itself, is open to question.

The ghoulishly ugly Goblin featured folding wings and no undercarriage, relying instead on the mothership’s trapeze mechanism.  Under pressure to curtail spending, the USAF cancelled the XF-85 project citing its relatively modest performance and the high level of pilot skill required to reattach the aircraft to its carrier. This was the end for the egg-like Goblin.

1: PZL M-15 Belphegor

In demonology, Belphegor is one of the seven princes of Hell notorious for seducing people by suggesting to them ingenious inventions to make them filthy rich. Its aircraft namesake is often described as the ugliest aeroplane ever built.  The M-15’s unlikely appearance is somewhat like allotment buildings frozen halfway in the transformation to flying locomotives.

Belching smoke as it flies at ultra low-level across bleak remote farmlands, the M-15 could be seen as a very visceral metaphor for the communist era. Its origins are cloaked in intrigue – according to one engineer who worked at Mielec at the time part of the original specification was for a chemical warfare aircraft to brutally put down insurgencies or revolutions.