Alfredo Ereno Very Odd Airplane Project of 1924

[hesham]

From; Quando volare Era Difficile - Ereno A.

here is a strange safety airplane of 1924.

http://www.avia-it.com/act/biblioteca/libri/PDF_Libri_By_AVIA/Quando%20volare%20Era%20Difficile%20-%20Ereno%20A..pdf

 

[riggerrob]

Looks like a railway passenger car with “flying bits” bolted on after the fact!
Why no tail surfaces?
Why the huge gaps in the wing roots? That would double the number of wing tip vortexes.

 

[maxmwill]

I think I saw the descendant of this in Skycaptain and the City of Tomorrow. That's an aircraft carrier, not a safetyplane. It carries aircraft, ergo, it's an aircraft carrier, albeit a gloriously deadly one(when one of those little gear drives fails).

 

[maxmwill]

Ok, I'm stupid. I thought that in 7.PNG, there were a couple aircraft on the top. Those are the engines inside. I ASSumed they were aeroplanes. I'm stupid.

Still, it might be a worthy project for scratch building. And it might've been a lot more successful than the Zhuchenko Aerostatoplan, a tilt rotor VTOL design built in Yugoslavia in 1937 by Nicolai Zhuchenko. Looked kinda like the V-22 Osprey, but instead of a pair of cross-coupled huge engines, this one was powered by a 50 horses, and the pilot was more a "pilot", because he had no controls, just a seat. And made a lot of noise, enough vibrations to scare the hell out of the pilot, but not even a hover of a few cm. I have the 1/48 Kora kit, and after a lot of examinations of the few photos available, with a few mods, it'll look a lot better(I'd still like a few shots of the interior, though, especially the cockpit and engine location. the little resin engine supplied with the kit doesn't even barely resemble a real Walter Mikron, and the fuselage of the model has no location for it, even though the instructions hint at one). And I have one huge beef on this. PE brass is nice, but not as landing gear struts on a model, especially a resin one. But the spares box is always quite generous. Biplane wing struts can make for some nice landing gear struts.

 

[maxmwill]

I'd sure like to have read the pirep(pilot report) on this. The pilot must've been drunk when he said "yes" to sitting in the seat of that machine.