Dan Dare aircraft designs

[bigvlada]

I was reading old Dan Dare comics recently (and this time it was in color, they were published in Yugoslavia mostly as white and black comics) and stumbled upon several pages of aircraft designs that were marked as future. I know that Flying Flapjack and XF5U are real projects, I have seen pictures of oblique wing and flying wing projects here on the forum but what about the rest of the lot?

 

[Hood]

Eagle Comic (the 1950s-1960s Dan Dare comic) had some cutaways of projects drawn by L Ashwell Wood, a respected cutaway artist who had done some excellent ship cutaways during the war and worked from original plans etc.
The 'Eagle Annual of the Cutaways' features cutaways of; the Handley Page HP.113, labelled as a 'Bussiness-Man's Jetliner' and on seeing a GA drawing on this forum I matched the two up and found the internal details of the wing boundary-layer piping etc. to be very accurate. The Eagle drawing has a standard airliner-style nose and a 8-12 passenger cabin rather than the Canberra nose proposed for the research version. Was Wood shown a proposed civil-version by Handley Page?
A Blackburn Beverley is shown as the 'Mark 2 Blackburn Universal Freighter', probably a mistake based on the original General Aircraft name but the drawing is of a civil version with two-storey car ferry layout with an aft compartment for 42 passengers in the upper fuselage/ tail boom. Makes me wonder if Blackburn had hoped to market a civil version as the 'Universal Freighter'?
The W.11 Cervia Air Horse is also shown, 1960s drawings include the X-15. Many of the cutways in the book are of real aircraft.
Wood did sometimes draw fictional aircraft, like an impressive six-engine 1,000mph delta flying-wing bomber with ASMs and AAMs which has an ogival wing planform. Another is a four-turboprop tilt-wing VTOL airliner with a Viscount-ish fuselage inspired by that year's (undated) Farnborough show which he based on "models and scientific research, which is now going on. It looks quite a plausible design, speculative probably closely based on a wind-tunnel model.

A best-of the 1960s Eagle Annual edition features a cutaway by Wood of the Hawker Siddeley HS.133 VTOL airliner project and the futuristic Thames heliport shown in the Hawker Siddeley promotional image, later re-used for the HS.141 (both pictures are reproduced in 'Stuck on the Drawing Board'.

Other children's books had hints of other projects too, particularly Ladybird books, again drawn by respected artists who did some pretty accurate still-life work for the books. The 1970 Ladybird book of 'Through the Ages Transport' features an airport scene, in the background is a Concorde in accurate JAL colours.

 

[starviking]

As a kid in the 70s Look and Learn Magazine seemed to do most of what Eagle did in preceding decades. It's a pity the kids now have nothing comparable to read.

 

[CNH]

http://www.dandare.org/eaglesite.htm

Scroll down to the cutaways.

 

[Orionblamblam]

It's a pity the kids now have nothing comparable to read.

It's a pity kids now have nothing comparable to look forward to. In the 1970's, aerospace began to grind to a halt, though it might not have seemed like it just yet. Prior to that, the world saw fighters and jetliners and bombers and such cranking out on a regular and rapid basis. Today... hmmmph. The most recent US fighter is the F-35, the program for which began nearly 20 years ago. The next US fighter? Decades away. The next jetliner that *doesn't* look like a warmed-over 707? Probably not in many of our lifetimes.

With nothing actually coming, there's not much to illustrate, except for half-formed notions that pretty much everyone knows not only won't leave the drawing board, they won't even get to the drawing board.

 

[starviking]

It's a pity the kids now have nothing comparable to read.

It's a pity kids now have nothing comparable to look forward to. In the 1970's, aerospace began to grind to a halt, though it might not have seemed like it just yet. Prior to that, the world saw fighters and jetliners and bombers and such cranking out on a regular and rapid basis. Today... hmmmph. The most recent US fighter is the F-35, the program for which began nearly 20 years ago. The next US fighter? Decades away. The next jetliner that *doesn't* look like a warmed-over 707? Probably not in many of our lifetimes.

With nothing actually coming, there's not much to illustrate, except for half-formed notions that pretty much everyone knows not only won't leave the drawing board, they won't even get to the drawing board.

True, though the airborne weapons front still seems strong. Not as exciting as manned aircraft though.