Yeah, but then again a lot of dud aircraft are a case of putting it in the wrong role or bad judgments in the design or deployment level, or quite simply being completely outclassed by the opposition. The Buffalo held its own in Finnish hands but fell apart when facing Zippos.

The M61 was originally a pure piece of FOD don't forget ;) The M61A1 was where things finally came along ;)

Not sure if it counts, but how about the S-class Zeppelins?

http://www.corbisimages.com/images/6...0/NA015733.jpg

As close as you'll get :DL

Was it a military commitment,
 

:hmmm:

Yes.

Disagree. It racked up high combat losses due to being at the forefront of the bombing campaign. The dive bombing issue was due to it being designed as a low level strike bomber and since production had stopped they weren't going to update it.

It was the perfect example of an aircraft being asked to do a job for which it hadn't been designed.

Agree with this. My grandfather worked for Republic Aviation on the 105s (he also has talked to me about the never built XF-103...cool plane but ahead of its time). He complains bitterly that the 105 was being regularly asked to do things that it was never designed to do. It was never meant to be a conventional bomber, it was supposed to get in, drop a nuke (for which precision is kind of unimportant, hence the lack of sights) and get out.

I've always kind of liked the Thud. Classy looking bird in some respects. :)


EDIT - Although, I wonder what my opinion of it would be had I ever flown one.

I'd say that's probably a fairly good nomination.

Combat aircraft? Yes.

Slow, low payload, expensive to operate, huge target, and oh yeah, basically a flying bomb itself (thank you hydrogen, which + tracers = boom).

LOL :DL

I'd agree....I was thinking of the Zeppelin earlier on :yep:

Those are Zeppelin problems in general, but the 'Height Climbers' had even worse problems on top of that. While they did achieve the primary design purpose of flying higher than British aircraft and air defences could reach, the men and equipment inside had no adequate protection against the cold and lack of oxygen at such high altitudes, making them rather dangerous to fly. The general navigation and accuracy problems that Zeppelins had were also made much worse thanks to the increased altitude. If that wasn't bad enough, the removed engine made them even slower than preceding classes and the lighter construction made them very fragile and vulnerable to the wind (Which was made even worse because of the altitude, of course).

The problem with the Starfighter was that due to its small wings, it had to land at a fairly high speed. One mistake and you were toast. But then the FW-190 in WW2 had the same problem.

Yeager was not flying a regular F-104, but an NF-104 which had a rocket engine attached to reach record high altitudes. The rocket turned out to completely screw up the aerodynamics of the plane and Yeager got into a flat spin that he could not recover from (as I recall, the book "The Right Stuff" has a detalied description of the flight).

When he ejected, he wound up colliding with the retro rocket of his ejection seat, which started a fire inside his helmet and his glove.

I would agree with Xabbarus. The F-105 was designed to carry a single nuclear bomb against tactical targets, In Vietnam it was asked to carry out a job it was not designed to do.

It turned out to be able to carry a high bomb load and be a decent combat aircraft as well, shooting down many Mig-17s which were more agile , but slower. Its only real enemy was the MIG-21 which totally outclassed the Thud.

The high combat losses had more to do with the Air defences over North Vietnam than the plane's design. The Soviets used Vietnam to test and refine their air defence network. By 1968, Hanoi was the most heavily defended target in the world.

:yep:

According to his own account the rocket engine failed while he was too low for the installed thrusters to function properly (the NF-104 was designed to give X-15 pilots practice with the thrusters used to control the plane when it was high enough for the standard controls to be useless), and too high for the jet engine to work, which meant the hydraulicly-powered standard controls wouldn't work either. The plane began to descend in a nose-up position, and with no controls at all he couldn't even re-start the jet engine.

Neither pilot nor plane was to blame for the failure of the rocket engine.

One of the early problems (later fixed) on the F-104 was a downward-firing ejection seat, used because the early seats didn't have enough power to clear the tail if fired at supersonic speeds.

Don't forget the role it was pushed into in the Luftwaffe. Low flying fighter bombers always lose more planes and pilots to accidents as they are flying close to the ground which makes it difficult to correct mistakes. A 104 mechanic told me once that the loss rates with the Starfighter's predecessor, the F84 Thunderstrike, were even higher.
At the end of it's career the 104G had become a pretty reliable craft. They were withdrawn in 1986 and the last pilot was killed in 1981 (IIRC). That's five years of flying without a fatal incident.

I new someone was going to post the Rocket Fighter. ;)

XF-103, just read up on it, sounds like an American MiG-25 Foxbat. Very neat.

Did they consider warm cloths and oxygen masks? I know very little about WWI aircraft but I know they used Nitrous Oxide as an inhaled sedative in the Civil War and making oxygen can be done by mixing chemicals (I did it in chemistry class). Coudln't they mix whatever they used to deliver inhaled sedatives but hook it to something that made oxygen? Or did they have compressed air back then?

*F84F Thunderstreak ;)

my pick is still the Boulton Defiant...
http://www.aeroflight.co.uk/wp-conte...fiant-bpa3.jpg

a fighter with no forward firing guns...:ping:

F-104s ...:hmmm:
Yeap that sure is a whole discussion on its own. Very controversial... When used in the Hellenic Airforce it claimed 16 pilots (?:hmmm:). I think everybody was pleased when the F-5s,-4s, Mirages and A-7 Corsairs started to come "into play" in the '70s.


.

http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/9...shipsmiley.gif The Corsair II

The greatest strike aircraft of all time... :up:

Hardly, not only did it perform very well until the Luftwaffe started attacking it from outside its firing arc, but it also was a pretty good night fighter later on.

Well, presumably they did wear warm clothes, I don't know how much they helped at 6,000 meters. I also don't know what they did or could about the oxygen problem. I do know they had plenty of problems with the engines and equipment as well men because of these conditions, though.

Regardless, they had plenty of other problems. Many were literally blown off target (Or crashed) by the wind, others couldn't find their way to the target or back home (Or were shot down after descending in an attempt to discover their location). Overall, quite unsuccessful.