What Were The Most Unusual Aircraft Features Ever Designed?

A vital element of bespoke kit-build steel buildings is that they need to be fit for purpose. This is true regardless of whether that purpose is a more general function, such as an office and workshop, or if it is something more specialised, like an aircraft hangar.

The hangar has changed its shape considerably over the years, from the makeshift sheds used by Orville and Wilbur Wright to the specialised and extraordinarily wide hangars used to house the vast Airbus A380.

Hangars are shaped by the aircraft that use them, which leads to some rather interesting hypotheticals if the following truly bizarre aircraft design elements and features had become mainstream.

A Rectangular Stealth Plane

Many of the most unusual aircraft ever made are demonstration craft designed largely for testing and proving concepts rather than entering full production, and the Northrop Tacit Blue had a truly unusual rectangular shape rather than the typically rounded shapes seen in aircraft design.

More closely resembling a tea tray with rectangular wings than an aircraft, the Tacit Blue was designed to test the principle of stealth planes, or aircraft that could fly without being easily detected by radar.

It did this, but it was typically regarded as difficult to fly and heavily reliant on fly-by-wire systems to make it controllable at all. However, it would help to inspire the B-2 Stealth Bomber, a radical but highly successful stealth aircraft concept.

A Duck-Shaped Aircraft

In 1883, Alexandre Goupil tested one of the earliest flying machines, with a bizarre dual-wing design, a steam-powered propeller and a body inspired by actual birds. It never flew, but an engineless prototype did end up being tested before the idea was abandoned.

Ordinarily, this is where the story of an unusual aircraft would end, but this baffling duck-shaped curiosity also played a crucial role in a patent war waged by the Wright Brothers against Glenn Curtiss and the rest of the world.

Orville and Wilbur had a patent on wing-warping, a specific, troublesome and long-obsolete form of flying controls, but they had weaponised it and ignorance of aviation to create a monopoly on flying machines, including ones that used ailerons.

By 1917, with the US aviation sector so far behind Europe that American pilots were flying French and British planes in the First World War, Mr Curtiss cited Mr Goupil’s prototype and rebuilt it to prove that powered, controlled flight existed before the Wright Flyer.

Ultimately, this proved to be redundant, as the existential threats to the industry caused the US Government to force the aviation sector into arbitration and for Orville Wright to release the patent.

A Tailless Aircraft

Once aircraft were capable of consistent, sustained flight, one of the biggest concerns was aerodynamic stall, as an engine stalling midair could typically not be restarted without a significant loss of altitude and would almost inevitably spin to the ground.

One particularly novel solution was found in the Westland Pterodactyl, which had no tail, had swept wings mounted to the top and another set of much smaller wings to add stability.

It ultimately never went into full production despite decades of work, but eventually stalling was reduced thanks to the development of more advanced speedometers and anti-stall technologies.