The World's Worst Aircraft: From Pioneering Failures to Multimillion Dollar Disasters

written by: Cory Q

And when I say little I mean that the book itself is only 5 inches tall, 6.5 inches wide, and 1 inch thick. It features two pages for each craft (I would say airplane, but one is a flying tank). The left page gives a short history and information as to why the craft was a failure and the right page has a picture of the craft and points out some of the more unusual features. This layout is greatly preferable to the picture being obscured and ruined by being split on two pages as one often sees with larger picture books. It makes for perfect lunch-time or waiting-for-an-appointment reading.

The book features 150 aircraft and is divided into the following sections: Behind the Times, Bogus Concepts, Power Problems, Construction Disasters, and Unintentionally Unstable. My favorite section is the bogus concepts.

This tome of side-steps and backward bounds covers a wide range of countries (Poland, Austria-Hungary, France, Britain, United States, France, Russia, China, Italy...), manufactures (well known and obscure), and eras (early aviators in at the turn of the 19th century up to modern mach 3 failures). Most of the crafts are timed around the world wars, but that make sense since most of the major innovations in flight and demand for new planes have come from those conflicts.

Some of the more notable and interesting crafts range from such death traps as the Fairey Battle (a poorly armed and sluggish British craft from 1936 that was blown out of the sky in massive numbers), such out-of-date throwbacks as the Chinese Sheyanf J-8 (which according to the author, when it flew in 1988 represented the best in 1950s fighter technology), such pioneering design failures as the Armstrong Whitworth Ape (a 1926 British craft that was almost completely changeable to study different aerodynamic configurations but by being so changeable did nothing well) and overly specific oddities like the 1953 Convair F2Y Sea Dart (the only super sonic flying boat, thanks to the Americans) and the stubby McDonnell XF-85 Goblin (a plane designed to be carried by a B-36 bomber like a parasite which it would launch from the bomb bay and then the pilot of the Goblin would attempt to hook on to a suspended trapeze 1948) and the just plain bizarre Goodyear Inflatoplane (exactly what it sounds like, and inflatable rubber airplane from 1956).

The author points out right on the dust jacket this is book 'takes a lighthearted look' at what made these crafts failures. That means that if you are looking for an in-depth examination, you will need to look somewhere else. This is light but interesting reading.

I found only two things I didn't like about this book. The first one is the use of technical terms relating to the wings of different craft that I didn't know. This seemed to break with the style of being written for someone with a casual interst in the subject. The second issue is clunky phrasing and writing from time to time. It seems like the book was edited very quickly from a much larger description of certain crafts.

So, if you are looking for a small, inexpensive, interesting book on aircraft, then this is the book for you. I highly recommend it.

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