You’ve got to love the Vulcan.

[Foxbat]

I’m sure I read somewhere that landing the Komet was one of the most dangerous parts of flying it. It is a crazy little plane and I always wondered what the tiny propellor on the front was for. I finally found out that it powered a dynamo, which in turn powered all the instrumentation and whatnot.
Here’s Eric ‘winkle’ Brown’s thoughts as he was reunited withthe plane he flow over 70 years ago (you can see the prop I’m talking about in one of the photos).

WWII test pilot reunited with the "highly volatile" Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet he flew in 1945 | Culture24

Captain Eric Brown CBE has been reunited with a Messerschmitt Me 163B-1a Komet at the National Museum of Flight in East Fortune, East Lothian, 70 years after he first flew the highly volatile aircraft.

www.culture24.org.uk

 

[BigBadBob141]

One other insane aircraft was the American 1930s racer the Granville Gee Bee R-6.
It was basically a truly enormous radial engine with just a pair of small wings strapped on it.
The thing looks like fifty percent engine and very difficult to fly, it killed a few pilots!
P.S. Eric was one hell of a test pilot!!!

 

[Foxbat]

Had to google the R-6. It’s a plane you’d expect to see from the Art Deco era. I like it

 

[Vladd67]

The R-6 looks like something out of Crimsons Skies

 

[BigBadBob141]

Could be completely wrong about this, but when they were first trying it out was there a piloted version of the V1 flying bomb.
I think the famous test pilot Hanna Reitsch even flew it.

 

[Vladd67]

Could be completely wrong about this, but when they were first trying it out was there a piloted version of the V1 flying bomb.
I think the famous test pilot Hanna Reitsch even flew it.

Fieseler Fi 103R Reichenberg - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[BigBadBob141]

Good grief I was right, and they actually found people mad enough to fly this thing.
We had an old heater that looked like the engine of a V1 sticking upright, in the factory where I worked, it burnt paraffin and when it was going full blast in really sounded like a V1!

 

[Vladd67]

 

[JunkMonkey]

Where I grew up in Leicestershire as a kid in the 1960s our house was right under the flightpath from some RAF Airbase. I remember these buggers coming low over our house. There were terrifying huge and seemed so SLOW.