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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?
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.
(@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.