Smithsonian Channel - Unbelievable Flying Objects HD (2007)

A hilarious countdown of the black sheep of aviation, aircraft that have embarrassed their builders, enraged the owners and terrified their pilots. These are stories of aircraft that should have never been built, including highly imaginative concepts to “fly” tanks and jeeps directly onto the battlefield, the Avro VZ-9-AV Avrocar, a real flying saucer, Hiller Flying Platform, McDonnell Douglas XF-85 Goblin and starkly bizarre efforts to design and build a submarine that flies. We come to understand why these ideas were doomed from the start… In the history of aviation, there were some ideas that didn't quite…fly. Before the Wright brothers, a good many aspiring aviators thought they had stumbled on the secret of flight and built flying machines to test their ideas. None of these were successful, of course, and quite a few of them were so far off base that, looking back from the advantage of our 21rst-century viewpoint, we wonder how the builders could possibly have thought they might fly. Even after the Wright brothers showed the world how to build an airplane, strange contraptions of dubious airworthiness continued to appear. From the bizarre vertical “Pogo” plane to the disastrous Goblin, nicknamed the “Flying Egg,” we take a look at ideas that didn't quite work in the history of aviation.

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