Weird Wings

Weird Wings celebrates the most unconventional, counter-intuitive and downright eccentric aircraft designs ever conceived. Spanning more than a century of aviation history, it explores flying wings, lifting bodies, tailsitters, parasite fighters, asymmetric aircraft, VTOL experiments, inflatable aeroplanes and other radical solutions to very real engineering and military problems. From NASA’s lifting-body programme – including the X-24A, M2-F3 and HL-10 – to Cold War oddities, four-helicopter airship Helistat, wartime desperation projects and modern experimental platforms, this is a story of ambition, risk-taking and the thin line between genius and madness. The emphasis is on explanation as much as spectacle: why these aircraft looked the way they did, what they were trying to achieve, and what aviation learned from them.