Proposed in 1939 it was intended to demonstrate operational performance on par with the Korean War-era jets.
The He-163 was still more successful than the first American fighter jet, the Lockheed L-133. But that ambition came at the cost of the airplane being laughably underpowered, hard to fly, unreliable, and generally bad by almost every account. It may or may not have shot down one British airplane, but the account is heavily contested, as the majority of He-162s were too busy falling apart in the sky.Īn attempt to design a cheap and easily producible fighter jet at a time when fighter jets were still largely a thing of the future, the He-162 deserves some respect. But only around 120 have been delivered to the military, even fewer of those have been flown, and there is even a debate if any combat flights took place. Going by numbers alone it would be difficult to call it a failure – over 300 were manufactured, a number not all modern fighter jets could boast about. But none of them failed as hard as the He-162. Be it the Focke-Wulf Triebflügel, a project to develop VTOL bomber hunter, or Focke-Wulf Ta 183 that pretty much defined the look of the first generation of fighter jets. Late Nazi Germany was ripe with failing fighter jet designs, one more audacious than the other. The first prototype crashed in 1944 killing the test pilot, and the project was cancelled in favor of more conventional designs. It proved to be incredibly difficult to control, a notorious feature of all flying wings. One could only imagine how the dogfights of such aircraft would have looked.
#X plane 10 aircraft list skin
So, the XP-79 – which was initially conceived as a rocket-powered aircraft – was supposed to be armed not with guns, but with 19 mm (0.75 in) thick magnesium alloy skin on leading edges of its wings, that (at least in theory) could cut through any foe like butter. Since they are so fast, wouldn’t it be more efficient just to ram them into enemy bombers?
One of the first American jet fighters and one of the legendary flying wings of John Northrop, the XP-79 appeared in the early 40s, when it was not entirely clear what to do with those new, fast jet fighters. This one gets here on the sheer audacity of the project alone. But the controversy and the alleged second life only adds to the attraction of this Israeli jet which never entered into production. There also exists a question of whether the Lavi really failed, as after the Chinese Chengdu J-10 surfaced several years later, many noted an uncanny similarity to the canceled Israeli project. Its proponents have been accused of harboring an unsustainable prestige project, as purchasing a fleet of F-16s – a decision which eventually happened – would have been a lot cheaper. The jet was very advanced for the time, maybe even more so than the SAIA 90, and has been sucking Israeli taxpayer money since the mid-70s. The point is, the development was incredibly expensive. It is a matter of debate whether the Lavi, Israel’s very own fourth-generation fighter jet development, failed due to political circumstances or its internal flaws. In the end, not even a prototype was produced, and after a couple of decades and a lot of wasted money, the project was dropped. All of these circumstances contributed, but the main reason behind the SAIA 90’s failure was the sheer ambition of the jet – it had to be incredibly advanced to meet the requirements, which were way too ambitious for the manufacturer. Also, there was quite a bit of international isolation going on. Also, it was a time of huge economic recession for the country. Fourth-generation implied some bleeding-edge technology, and the jet had to compete with the likes of the F-16 and the Mirage 2000 – no small task for a country with an economy just slightly larger than that of the US state of Colorado. FMA initiated the project in the 80s, and it was stupendously ambitious for the time.
Designed in collaboration with Dornier, the SAIA 90 was supposed to be Argentina’s fourth-generation fighter jet – a proud successor of the country's aviation industry that was one of the finest in the world right after WWII.