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30 October 2007

What's the absolute coolest looking biplane? Or triplane? Or uniplane, if you must include that Mystery thing that put the biplanes out of business? I mean, a Sopwith Camel looks obviously somehow kinda niftier than a Spad, no?
What's the absolute coolest looking biplane?


In the whole of human history, I believe that this sentence has never been uttered/typed before now. Google agrees.

While I have no answer for the question itself, never having contemplated it before, I do admire its unique nature.

posted by bmarkey 30 October | 01:06
Pitts Special. Nothing cooler.
posted by dg 30 October | 01:29
I am afraid that I'm a Blackbird girl, myself (having worked for Lockheed only makes me geekier for them...)
posted by lonefrontranger 30 October | 07:57
I think that if it doesn't look like it's going to fly apart if you sneeze, it's not a bi/tri/multiwinged plane:

Curtiss
Avro
Felixstowe
Voisin
Jacobs
posted by plinth 30 October | 09:04
Beech Staggerwing.

ISTR there's also a very slick, streamlined biplane whose wings have an anhedral/dihedral that makes a mild X shape. I thought it was a de Havilland but seem to be wrong.
posted by ROU Xenophobe 30 October | 10:04
(@lonefrontranger: You kids and your fast-burner high-performance jets!)

If form ever follows function, I think for sheer biplane coolness, it's a tie between two workhorses from different eras:
  • The venerable Fairey Swordfish, the "Stringbag" that was technologically obsolete at the outset of World War II but remained in service to the end of the war. It made naval-air-warfare history at Taranto (from which Yamamoto and Co. got the encouragement that Pearl Harbor might just be possible tactically) and was instrumental in the destruction of the dreaded German battleship Bismarck. Flying one off an aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic most of the year required a lot of guts and physical endurance (open cockpits, miserable wx conditions), but it was a reliable short-range maritime strike and ASW (sub-hunter) airplane.
  • The Antonov An-2 (NATO reporting name: "Colt"), a nearly indestructible and utterly reliable aircraft that I've seen "hover" flying at altitude upwind into a steady 30-knot wind. I knew a naval Spetnaz (essentially a Soviet version of an SBS or a SEAL) who called it the most versatile fixed-wing special-operations aircraft ever devised -- its STOL capability meant that you could fly twelve operators into places that weren't even places, do your stuff and fly out again, and it's the perfect sort of airplane to para-drop from, especially for LALO (low altitude/low-opening) insertions. It's a simple brute-force kind of airplane that can carry large loads to and from unimproved airstrips, for rural deliveries (a flying cargo and mail truck) and a crop-duster.
posted by PaxDigita 30 October | 14:50
Not a biplane, but I like the Piper Pacer Miss Pearl. Makes me want to learn how to fly a taildragger.
posted by exogenous 30 October | 15:13
THANKS, folks. Cool stuff. I'll let you know how I use it later.
:-)
posted by shane 30 October | 18:32
elizard: I got your package. || Happy Birthday the great big mulp !

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