How can a plane be described as the most dangerous in the world? The key is to look at what happened in the first decades of its existence.
The history of air mobility, without a doubt, is not one of the most experienced. With barely a century of history, we find ourselves before a means of transport that took flight in the early years of the 20th century. A few years after World War II, the first commercial flights began, which allowed this industry to be a benchmark in the world. In the field of warfare, the aforementioned war marked a before and after for this product.
Now, to what extent were there planes that didn’t measure up? We are talking about a time when important stages of innovation and development were carried out. It was a stage in which the incorporation of novelties was something completely logical and necessary, which is why, on occasions, it was Witness Aircraft Not Performing Great. The best example of this was the Cantilever Aero Bullet. Within the sector it is considered one of the craziest options in history.
Why is it considered the worst airplane ever built? At Urban Tecno we wanted to discover why does this plane have such a bad reputation, why it is one of the options with the worst valuation at the time and, of course, to what extent the general opinion may be right in this regard. Who was going to say that we would find ourselves before an alternative with such a painful configuration?
An airplane with inadvisable materials and a series of useless features
Named Christmas Bullet, this plane was several years in development. During this period the First World War took place, at which time combat aviation began to be experimented with. Despite this, this model was free and decided to create the model rejecting all proposals from the sector. In this way, the fuselage was made of wood, while there was a metallic layer on the outside. The weight, without a doubt, was one of its main defects.
Similarly, the creator, William Whitney Christmas, believed that the installation of flexible wings was essential. In the first flight attempt, which took place in 1919, during the takeoff maneuver, the wings separated from the fuselage, causing an accident that ended the life of the pilot, Cuthbert Mills. This accident was hidden from the American aeronautical community, so a second unit was soon created applying a series of changes. According to information from Wikipedia, it was leaked to the press that the model in question had reached a maximum speed of 317 km/h.
This note gave the manufacturer great notoriety, which is why successive models were exhibited in some of the most iconic places in American society. The problem is that it had all been a great marketing exercise that would later be uncovered. The second model in question also ended in the worst possible way. Allington Pilot Joyce Jolly it also ended up crashing after carrying out the takeoff maneuver. After this episode, the entire plot was revealed.
The objective had been directly linked to the obtaining of public funds by the founder of the company. In fact, the plane was not even submitted to the official tests of the US military. A short time later, the project fell under its own weight, running out of funds to continue financing an aircraft that had a whole series of structural problems. Who was going to say that a proposal of these characteristics was going to have such a failed ending? Seeing it in perspective, the strange thing is that the project lasted so long.