"Abortive Aircraft.."

A brief but affectionate look at some of the best forgotten and misbegotten aircraft designs that didn't really make it.

Yezhov YE-3 'Poison dwarf' ground attack fighter (Soviet Union - 1938)

In early 1938, it first became apparent, that the star of Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the NKVD and hand-maiden to the great purges taking place in the Soviet Union, was starting to falter. A desperate and as it turned out, ill-advised attempt to curry favour with Stalin followed, as he branched out into the high risk but potentially highly rewarding world of aerospace design.

In spite of the fact that he was able to cherry pick the best brains from all the other recently imprisoned design bureaux, headed by Feodor Numptiskaya, the end result of this mad inventiveness was disappointing to say the least.

The aim was to fill an urgent requirement for a ground attack fighter, before a more sensible design could be tested and flown. To keep development costs down and timescales reasonable, existing components were re-used as much as possible. Unfortunately, most of these were supplied by the non- aviation facing elements of the army, resulting in a machine with a very rugged construction, but limited flying ability.

Notable features were the caterpillar tracked landing gear, for take-off and landing from very poor and rough cross country conditions. No bomb load was carried, offensive and defensive tasks were carried out from the stolen and hastily bolted on T-27 turret's 47mm cannon and co-axial machine gun. Power was supplied by the tank's Tovarisch diesel to a pusher prop at the rear, enabling a gentle nose-down descent, assuming the aircraft was thrown off the top of a hill at the start of the mission.

Worst of all, the Ye-3 featured the innovative and never to be repeated on any other aircraft design 'Automatic commissar'. This nifty piece of hardware could detect disloyalty to the motherland often before the pilot realised it themselves. The device was then pre-programmed with full arresting and sentencing powers to abort the mission and fly on to the nearest gulag with the hapless pilot unable to do anything about this.

The unveiling of the production prototype in the 1939 Moscow May Day Parade and subsequent crashing of it into the Kremlin gift shop was deemed to be the final straw that broke the Stalin's back as far as Yezhov was concerned. He was arrested, stripped of all remaining powers, liquidated and a full production run of 4333 of these misbegotten aircraft followed from there. They were deemed to be completely useless, apart from their fulfilling of the relevant five year plan and were promptly put into the 'forgetting place' storage facility, colloquially referred to by ordinary Russians in fearful whispers as "Uncle Vanya's elephant cupboard."

There was a sad sequel, as in the crisis days of 1941, several penal squadrons were equipped with YE-3's hastily yanked out of obsolescence and put back into service. The material effect on the Germans was minimal, the steppes of western Russia were littered with countless wrecks of YE-3's as the automatic commissar's had deteriorated whilst in storage, and took it upon themselves to abort in mid-mission and crash the aircraft to inflict a wartime death penalty for perceived dereliction of duty.

The Luftwaffe captured several examples, no test pilots were forthcoming to evaluate them, and the single forced gunpoint volunteer strapped himself to an outgoing V-1 flying bomb prototype as a preferred choice of self- termination. Thus ended one of the more drunken chapters of Soviet aviation history.

Handley-Meadowes 'Woolacombe' mini-bomber (United Kingdom - 1942)

The rather sad tale of how this misbegotten tale of aviation woe came about, started from an Air Ministry requirement in late 1942. Rather than concentrating on area bombing, with its uncertain results and widespread devastation affecting areas other than the intended target, the Air Ministry looked for a smaller machine that could precision bomb point targets at a very close range.

Specifically they were looking at an aircraft that could get inside the Berlin subway system, where it was believed that several Nazi leadership targets were hiding, and of course, the current generation of rather wide four-engined heavy bombers were totally unsuitable for such a mission.

Ultimately it turned out that nothing at all was suitable, and all the major aviation companies declined to take this on. However, a small bedroom furniture maker, Handley-Meadowes decided to give it a go as their contribution to the war effort.

The resulting bag of bits cajoled, borrowed and stolen from the parts bins of other aviation manufacturers was christened the 'Woolacombe', after the chief designer Ted Numpty's favourite beach resort in Devon. As the photo caption shows, it amazingly flew. The pared-down nature of the design was too successful in the paring down process. combining a small pair of wings, a cockpit, and a defensive gun turret, but with no room whatsoever for meaningful quantities of fuel or any bomb load at all.

When Arthur Harris, the chief of Bomber Command was shown the resulting concoction, he concluded that any Nazi leadership figures attacked by this aircraft would sooner die laughing on sight, rather than from any combat potential on its part. Then he shouted "PISS OFF!" at a very great volume and repeatedly stamped upon and shattered one of the only three 'biro' ballpoint pens currently existing in the UK at that time.

The 'Woolacombe' was never heard from again.

Reichskommittee Seegeschwader Waffelbomber IV (3rd Reich - 1943)

As the second world war ground on, with worsening prospects, the question of strategic raw materials, never a good one to have to answer at the best of times, marched in boldly and poked the assembled members of the Reichskommittee repeatedly, in both eyes.

Their problem was to increase aircraft production, within the limited and declining amounts of raw material available. Any means, including some quite radical product substitutions were actively pursued.

The Waffelbomber was one of these. It was based on the existing and tried and tested JU87 Stuka airframe, but was reinterpreted through the manufacturing processes of a Dusseldorf confectionary and biscuit manufacturer, Gottlieb-Numptisch Sweetyumz GmbH.

Existing engines and wings were reused for the Waffelbomber, but the forward fuselage owed a lot more to the product expertise of the biscuit maker from Dusseldorf.

The concept was viable, and the Waffelbomber was able to fly and carry out its assigned tasks for testing purposes quite successfully. One early refinement which was applied urgently was a waterproof sugar glaze outer coating, when the second prototype got caught in a rain cloud and the front of the aircraft dissolved in mid-flight.

An initial production run of one hundred of these machines was undertaken in late 1943, and they were deployed to the Leningrad sector of the Russian front for operational testing.

Unfortunately, the Soviets, with the help of their excellent espionage network, were anticipating the appearance of these aircraft, and had selectively bred several thousand combat mice with a sweet tooth. These were airdropped very gently on to the Luftwaffe bases hosting the Waffelbomber with predictable end-results.

And that was the end of that programme, without a single combat mission being flown.

KraftCheese Inc CH-97 Air-Bison transport helicopter, aka 'RoflCopter'. (USA - 1968)

Kraftcheese Inc were a small helicopter manufacturer with a big problem.

They had created a tandem rotor transport helicopter, with more than a superficial resemblance to the competing Boeing Vertol Chinook, which was just entering service with the US Army in Vietnam. Clearly KraftCheese had to come up with a fresh approach to that crowded and competitive market.

They chose to pitch their offering to the burgeoning 'Psy-Ops' department, who were busily in the throes of having more money thrown at them than sense could legislate for. The 'Roll Around the Floor Laughing' Copter (more generally abbreviated to 'ROFLCopter' had its exterior transformed by massive smiley decals on the rear access ramp.

This would variously provide a reassuring smile for the transport version, to placate airlifted Vietnamese widows and orphans. Alternatively, it could be a sarcastic or ironic smile for the gunship variant, literally the last thing that the intended victims would see.

Also as part of the Psy-Ops remit, loudspeakers on the exterior would boom out at an overbearing volume what would become the "I love you, you love me" theme tune for 'Barney the Dinosaur', which was also intended to reassure and terrify in equal measure.

Unfortunately, the exterior wackiness transferred itself into the normally boringly sensible but crucially needing to be safe cockpit area, with a 'complete systems kill' switch being mislabelled as the rear windscreen wipers. Test pilots who managed to avoid that fairly major pitfall unfondly recalled that the handling and flight characteristics resembled the Joker out of Batman, anticipating the Heath Ledger version of that character by several decades.

So KraftCheese Inc were politely but firmly told to "stop it". No more was heard, although an animated GIF taken from old movie footage of a RoflCopter self-destructing whilst conducting an engine test on the ground, circulated widely many years later. ASCII graphical animations of this strange machine also became wildly popular on the internet.

The designer of this aircraft, Theodore P. Numpty, overcame this setback and went on to inspire the makers of the rather more successful 'Ren and Stimpy' cartoon series.

CiH for the Mag - 2010 - 2012

Back to Humour.