Five Weird Airplanes

By the 1960s, it was clear that twins were problematic. The whole theory behind the safety claims that manufacturers put forward was that in the case of an engine failure, you could still fly on with the remaining good engine. That was a best-case scenario. While we don’t know how many hundreds or thousands of […]

The ’70s brought us the popular notion that for the past 70-ish years, airplane designers had been building it all wrong, and the twin pusher turboprop Piaggio Avanti, a plane that’s at once beautiful and startlingly awkward, depending on what angle you see it from, was one of the fruits of that belief. The idea […]

One of the most fascinating airplanes in aviation history, the little Ercoupe, first developed in the 1930s as part of a government-backed designed project and first put into production by Erco, was one of those planes that looked odd for a good reason, or, in this case, for a number of reasons. Modern aviation observers […]

One of the most dramatically shaped planes in the sky, the PZL-104 Wilga was, like the other planes in this lineup, purpose built. In the case of this Polish utility plane, which went into service in 1962, the purpose was to be a multi-purpose sport plane, most notably a glider tug—in the former Soviet Bloc country, […]

The Cessna 206, a stretched 182/205/210, has a nose that’s perhaps a little too prominent for some folks. So when Cessna decided to give its backcountry operators an extra passenger seat by stretching the 206, the effect was very odd, like looking at a 206 in a stretchy funhouse mirror. But the plane made all […]