Airbus A380 and other ugly planes

On January 20th the brand new Airbus A380 approached Zurich for the first time. 23’000 people watched the show.

Several mates from work asked me why I didn’t go and take a few pictures. Here are my reasons:

1. I expected that there would be too many people around, and I don’t really like such crowds unless it’s the concert of one of my favourite bands.

2. Beginning with the summer-schedule Singapore Airlines flies to Zurich with the A380 every day, instead of two flights per day with the Boeing 777.

3. For me the A380 is not really a beautiful airplane. I think it looks like a sperm whale suffering from flatulencies…

Now, ugly airplanes have something like a long tradition, and here’s where I want to get to with this post. I’m not talking about the Boeing B757 with its slightly distorted proportions. There is worse in the history of airplanes.

A little historical flashback brings us to Everett WA in the year 1947. Commercial aviation is at the dawning of a new era. The Douglas Aircraft Company introduced their DC-4, which evolved from the C-54, and that was the first land-placed commercial airplane that could cross the Atlantic in a nonstop flight. Lockheed followed with the L-1049 Constellation – which in fact is one of the most elegant airplanes ever built.

Boeing had nothing to offer, as they had only built bombers during the war, the last being the B-29. Not the worst in ugly airplanes, but the cause is wrong: Dropping bombs onto other people just isn’t a nice thing to do... Instead of developing a completely new airplane, Boeing took the highly efficient, supercritical shaped wing of the B-29, mounted bigger Pratt &Whitney Wasp engines, and mounted it to a fuselage-construction never seen before: A widened B-29 fuselage was mounted on top of a standard fuselage, in front view the construction looked like an 8. The result was a freighter called C-97 Stratofreighter. The passenger-version was named B-377 Stratocruiser. Ugly enough?

Certainly not! When NASA started shooting apes into space with rockets, the need of a super-transporter to fly the rocket-segments from their building-site to the launch-site at Cape Canaveral became evident. A leading engineer of Conroy Aircraft once saw a Stratocruiser and thought, if it was possible to convert a B-29 into something like that, it would probably also be possible to build a much larger plane with the same airfoil. The result had such extreme proportions and was so ugly, that many aviation experts proved to be fish experts as well and called the plane ‘Pregnant Guppy’. The official name then was B-377PG. Further versions were then called B-377SG (Super Guppy), a version powered by turboprop engines was known as B-377TG (Turbine Guppy).

And here’s the catch to it: If you look very close, you’ll recognize certain similarities between the A380 and the Guppy-series...