Crazy Aircraft That Never Flew | Part 1: Airliners & Transports 

After the first successful powered airplanes were produced. Before that, there were lots of gliders, observation kites and other heavier-than-air machines, but engine development was lagging behind. Helicopters were known to be a valid concept for a long time, but they had to wait even longer before suitable engines were available.

@@jirivorobel942 Eh, the sheer audacity of the J-1000's design was still impressive and way ahead of its time. Gliders are all well and good, _cute_ even, but putting an engine on an aircraft changes just about everything. Now you need to worry about the weight of the engine, the weight of the fuel, how to balance the craft properly with this added weight, how to balance the craft _without_ the fuel weight too (because it fluctuates). How is the craft going to handle and perform, as well? Gliders _all_ move relatively slowly, but with powered aviation comes much, much greater speeds. So now we need well-trained pilots capable of handling these beasts of the air, not to mention more resilient material to build them from. _Engines change everything._ Just ask ships, yo.

It was the time of dreaming indeed. Kinda sad that the reality took over, and he ended up making Ju-52 instead. Whats interesting is that dreaming of unorthodox things isn't completely over - after all Tu-404 was a recent design, and unlike with Bel Geddes's flying cruise ship fantasy, you can be sure that if those people made it into models and presented around, they were prepared to produce it and were convinced that it's a working and viable design.

@@josephschultz3301 whilst putting engines on aircraft did allow speeds to rapidly increase, the earliest craft were slower than some of the gliders of the day and C of G problems with the small fuel tanks was not a great issue, as aircraft got larger and faster all these issues would appear but as they developed so did the pilots abilities, having said that how would a modern pilot being used to a modern cockpit fare when presented with a pioneer plane, whose flight envelope was dubious at the best of times!.

Or 23 years if, as seems likely, Gustave Whitehead undertook controlled, powered flight in August 1901. (The Wright brothers were much better self-publicists.)

GET IN! Sir I don't think,I said get in...that is a great scene haha.

Is this comment too late for the 1630 autogyro to the Prussian Embassy in Siam?

Who else watched that episode?

​@@emjackson2289only by just under 500 years. If you run, you may just catch the next suborbital transfer

Reminds me of the time in 1903 when Charles Lindbergh flew the Wright flyer 15 miles on a thimble full of corn oil, single handedly winning the civil war. I pieced American history together. Mostly from the Simpsons. 😉

yeah they're so cool. I wish I could have an original Piper J3

They were certainly ambitious considering the stuff that was going on in the world at the time.

@@nightshadow848 i always love looking at crazy aircraft like these

Then there is the distinct possibility of hitting a log or a dug-out canoe that could wreck one's landing. A RAF Sunderland crewed by Australians did make an emergency grass landing, having thrown anything moveable (and not human) out...it had been peppered with flak from a U-Boat.

Back in 1958 we emigrated to Australia by ship and the canteen tables were bolted to the floor,A lip around the table to prevent your meal from sliding of

In fairness, that applied equally to ocean liners; I've heard accounts of the crew on the QE2 having to lash down the piano.

Less of a problem then dealing with modern restrictions.

Imagine all the injuries on the dancefloor too haha

Thanks for sharing this - it was fun to watch and I learned a lot!

It's great video.. I haven't heard many of these concept airliners, especially Airliner Number 4...

Bloody right, it has right cheered me up in fact, more of this escapism I say!!

You know with so many people still living close to the water, it is surprising flying boats haven't found a niche or made any sort of comeback.

@@crazybarryfam I can't speak for any other countries but here in Canada that niche is filled by float planes, mostly bush planes. A properly kitted out Twin Beaver is a very nice bit of kit to vacation in, I'm told. Makes sense since we have a stupefying amount of the world's total fresh water and a completely unreasonable percentage of all the lakes on the planet. Ice age, y'know. Cheers from E. Ontario!

it's darwinian. Only the best win. Those other designs are pure trash.

I like to believe that on some Alien Planet in another Galaxy, these magnificent enormous airplanes are flying aloft with a more favorable atmosphere and propulsion system to enable the safe flight of these heavy beasts.

@@carlosandleon That's not how it works. The "good enough not to warrant further development at this time" win. The best is always over the horizon.

@@marcussoininen2084 Yeah but that clearly doesn't apply to these designs lol

@@marcussoininen2084 and sometimes it's the political situation that dictates regardless, where companies get pigeon holed to produce one type of product, similar to actors being typecast, Bruce Willis in a romantic comedy anyone?.😊.

Verne's generation, and pretty much every generation up to the end of the Second World War (and maybe a bit beyond?) knew in their hearts that there was still much to discover, and at least to the layman it didn't seem beyond reason (at least to them) that SOMETHING (TM) would come along to make it work.

Granted, back in the '30s, a state of the art huge aircraft engine barely put out 700 hp...

I was just gonna say this lol!

I remembered that too. I had to look up an image and it's almost identical!

No doubt Tailspin animators were mining for ideas.

Definitely based on that aircraft!

Incorrect the one on tailspin was called the spruce goose

An excellent summation of Norman Bel Geddes' life! I wonder if the amazing 'Airliner Number 4" seaplane he designed could be made into a working R/C model?

@@gizmonicman9879 what scale?, even in seventy second it would be huge, just so wish it is possible 😊.

He was also the father of Barbara Bel Geddes.

I know I am late to the party commenting on this, but I made a model of Norman Bel Geddes' Airliner No 4 for Microsoft Flight Simulator. You could look around the cockpit (which I did not finish fleshing out), look out the tail and see one of the planes stored in the tip of the floats, down the wing, and the control room in the wing on top. What he failed to mention is the wing on top was supposed to contain extra engines in addition to the ones actually being used, and they could be swapped out in flight using a built-in railway! I tried to picture all of this in my model of the control room, with the extra engines sitting there. Like most flying boats, the pilot would have probably telegraphed the control room what speed he wanted, and they would have adjusted the individual engines to suit. There would have been to major issues with his original design. When a flying boat is attempting to take off, the drag of the water on the hull tends to make the nose want to porpoise down. Most large flying boats countered this by having the wings with engines set way back, on smaller ones, the engines were angled upwards to try and counteract the rotating tendency when the throttle was advanced. Having the wing with the engines so far forward and so high up would have made it even worst on Airliner #4, which is probably why he moved it to the back in a later design. A bigger issue that could not be solved so easily is the fact that as the airplane banked, the passenger cabins on the tips would rise and fall by tens, even hundreds of feet at the tips. One could imagine trying to walk down the promenade deck when a bank begins; and having to hang on for dear life to keep from tumbling down the deck to the other wingtip. Still, it was fun imagining how it all would have worked had it been built. I "flew" it once from Chicago to Plymouth, though it left it to fly on its own over the Atlantic while I slept and did other things during the day. I never released it because I could not finish the cockpit to my liking; but you can see it here: facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.4440172976955 Some other calculations I came up with were: * 20 engines of 1,900 HP each; one third were envisioned to be running during cruise. A similar German DB603 engine had a specific fuel consumption of 0.474. At a cruise setting of 1,160 HP and a 45-hour flight; I came up with 1,044,00 HP/hr, and 82,202 gallons consumed during flight. (It was to be refueled in flight over Newfoundland.) 0.054 gallons per passenger mile. I roughly calculated the volume of the broad bottoms of each float, since that most likely would be the location of the tanks. In my final weight calculations, I came up with the following: * 152,200 lbs of humans on board * 9,132 lbs food * 129,120 lbs of water (based on 35 gallons per person the entire flight) * 10,000 lbs other payload and fluids * 662,600 pound empty weight * 1,275,300 max weight, leaving 312,248 lbs, or 51,868 gallons; 25,934 gallons per float, with arial refueling over Newfoundland. I could see pumps lifting the fuel to surge tanks in the auxiliary wing pylons, where individual pumps pumped it out to the each engine. The freshwater tanks could also be in each pylon, providing a head of water pressure for the passenger spaces.

The fact that it would have a librarian kills me.

Would love to live in a world where this kind of madness made it into reality

Truly a flightship - the concept Claude Dornier was aiming for with the Do X (the biggest plane of its era, yet much, much smaller than this).

I was thinking that some of these designs look more like (sci-fi) space craft when I read your comment!

Certainly. Several of these designs were still doing the rounds in the 1980s, in books and magazine articles with very similar themes to this video.

It's surprising Saunders-Roe lasted as long as it did as a company as they never really had any successes. Still if I had Bezos money rather than Blue Origin I would totally be funding the building of stuff like the Saunders-Roe Queen as a one-off just to see if it would work!

Or not so hypothetical - look up the Junkers G38 airliner that was rebuilt as a bomber by the Japanese as the Mitsubishi as the Ki-20…

And there’s Found and Explained too! All pretty good channels…

Also Dark Skies does same style content. Curious Droid also covers aerospace from a engineering standpoint. What happened to Mustard and Paper Skies besides upping their 3D modeling render game? There's only so many obscure planes to cover and only so many recently found documents.

drachinifel

@@EricHamm dark skies has so many errors tho, they and their other channels are not on this level.

@@davidmok108 Found and Explained has too much made up bullshit to take seriously. It's more click bait than fact.

Fun comment! But the part that really stuck with me is your father throwing out old set of encyclopedia. It pains me to read that.

Apparently your understanding of the universe and physics was more advanced at six years old than that of many adults today.

@@theobserver9131 I believe that I would have to agree with you on that one! Some of those "mature" bodies do not seem to have brains that developed after the toddler years.

@@theobserver9131 Besides being 40 years old, they had been stored in his garage and some had been wet and they all smelled musty.

His daughter wasn't bad looking either.

As designed it probably wouldn't have been stable, but if that could be managed it might actually work as a flying cruise ship. It's so large that it could get usable altitude from ground effect. Speed would of course be terrible, but if the whole point is to get your passengers to spend their money in bars and shops that's not a disadvantage! 😀

Many flying boats had and today still have such silly looking above the wing engines. See the successful Savoua Marchetti S55 of the 30s, along with numerous successful planes like the Walrus, and several Dornier flying boats. The Do-18, and 24.

@@JFrazer4303 See, the thing is, those planes also all had conventional designs, with main wings mounted close to the center of mass, and a long fuselage which mounted the stabilizers. Those planes did, and do, suffer from thrust-induced nose down pitch when the pilots fire-wall the throttles, especially at low airspeeds. This theoretical plane was effectively a flying wing. Conventional planes are stable because having the vertical and horizontal stabilizers on the tailplane, far from the center of mass, gives them leverage to keep the nose straight into the air flow. Shorten that fuselage close to the main wings, and there wont be enough leverage to be effective.

​ @bobkile9734 which is why in a later redesign, he moved the auxiliary wing further back; it is shown @8:05 and @8:23.

You said it exactly!

Good spot. I wonder if that is what they intended. Or maybe it was too carry a sort of shuttle service when they arrived at places.

Another commenter mentioned that it would store 2 planes on board 'for emergencies'.

I was thinking Dan Dare would have said yes to these early designs

several, likely.

I always felt the same way about the sea planes. The time of the Pan Am Clippers and other sea planes and companies could possibly be called the "romantic" time of air travel because of sense of adventure and pioneering travel to new exotic destinations that those planes opened up. To be a pilot or crew of a seaplane in those times had to of been an exciting job.

@@ronfullerton3162 a documentary with a former Empire flying boat passenger mentioned the pilot detouring to fly round the Great pyramid for the passengers to see it, not something you would get today methinks, I think the thirties must have been an incredible time to be aviating. The Saro Duchess had a cousin in the American Martin seamaster bomber, faster, more payload, and greater range than a B52, but the airforce didn't like the idea of wet feet😊, it may have helped had Boeing made it or am I being a bit cynical?.

@@CrusaderSports250 That is some really great information you brought up. Especially the circling of interesting points, wouldn't that be such a wonderful addition to the flight. Thank you for those interesting looks into the early era of commercial flight. That makes one wish they had a time machine to go back and actually experience it. Thanks again.