On the subject of top-dressers... ...I was privileged to see a turboprop equipped Fletcher FU-24 in action a couple of weeks ago, those pilots are very darn good at flying very low in hill country. Very loud and notable engine sound.
For ugly aircraft, look up French pre-WWII military aircraft, things like the Amiot 143 (yes, that's a real aircraft, not an AI hallucination) or almost anything that Farman made, "let's put wings on an aviary!". I think the 143's main defense was that Bf110 pilots would be so distracted either boggling or laughing they'd forget to fire at it.
The M-15 is still uglier. Also intended as a cropduster, though unlike the AirTruk it was really bad at that job in every way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlyO9cJ8hiQ (Alexander the ok: PZL Mielec M-15: One of the Aircraft of All Time)
That is, as well, an ugly plane, but once I parachuted out of one a couple of times, it grew on me.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/05/13/the-strange-barrel...
It looks like it really wants to scoop up a large amount of plankton mid-cruise.
Weird aircraft with a pusher engine? Curtiss-Wright XP-55 Ascender, right this way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss-Wright_XP-55_Ascender
(and check out the list of similar aircraft)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairey_Rotodyne
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkJOm1V77Xg - video by 'Mustard'
The Belphegor is still uglier though.
This photo though, I see what you mean.
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/z3envi/the_pzl_m1...
The AEW version looks ok
https://altitudepost.com/the-plane-without-wings-what-happen...
You got to love that even its name is utilitarian.
This is such a cool story. Airplanes seem such a complex, standardized, full of red tape and elitist thing that such stories of hackers starting to pull random beams together and you get a thing that flies are pretty inspiring... And yet it also sound quite well thought. As usual, there is more than meets the eye
As a kid, I was introduced to the concept of ultralight[0] aircraft when me and a couple of friends stumbled upon a wreck of one in a field. Our parents realized it had to have come from the local place a few miles away. If your aircraft qualifies as ultralight, you do not need a license to fly it. A family friend of my parents had one that he'd roll out to the street, attach the wings, and take off, and then land back on the street, remove the wings, and roll it back into his garage.
These things were essentially go-karts with wings.
One thing my son has always been obsessed with was planes. We started with paper planes, mainly the classic squarey one I learnt in school that has good balance of speed/airtime and tolerance to launching speeds and angles.
But he got bored and wanted more. We got deep in the rabbit hole of purely paper folding planes (and rockets), with regular visits to Ojimak[0] for more ambitious projects (they're 3D, glued, yet actually flying paper models).
Our latest endeavours involve keeping large Amazon delivery boxes to later take measurements, calculate weight balance, and creating airfoils by stacking several layers of cardboard in a tapered way to make gliders to throw outside (over 1m wingspan!).
In one of our walks we saw a man trying to put order in his garage; it was literally overflowing with home made RC planes, some were copies of standard designs, some quite unorthodox and some just plain head-scratching weird. We talked for a bit, he didn't even have technical background, and I was sold. Obviously it gets more expensive in terms of time and money, but I can't wait for my son to be old enough to dedicate time together in this direction.
This was magical to me. My "mentor" was able to build tiny butterfly-like contraptions with four flapping wings, and many other flying machines of different kinds.
Maybe this is interesting to your family as well!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Spacelines_Super_Guppy
Some like the Long-EZ, some see a face only a mother could love.
It's possible some are still intact and maybe a couple are still flyable. The only recent evidence any maybe still intact is a 2017 photo of ZK-CVB on static museum display at MOTAT NZ.
Neither do any other airplane types. Airliners, for example, are designed to minimize the need for maintenance and the fastest turnaround, because an airliner loses money at a prodigious rate when it sits on the ground.
aussie plane makes me think of the aussie flyer in the road warrior. (not even the same, but spiritually)
> But the airplane never became popular—although it became briefly famous when a heavily made-up example starred in 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
beyond thunderdome was the next in the series.
I thought everybody used aluminum?
I also imagine in the postwar WW2 antipodes, steel was a lot easier and cheaper to access, as well as work.
Update: I guess the final design also used steel.
> The pilot is above both the engine and the load, and is surrounded by a steel tube truss for maximum safety.