Pages

Thursday 10 June 2010

Here's something I made up earlier ... or so I thought!

Many years ago I was given a model of a Gee Bee Model Z racing aircraft, and the design has always intrigued me. Therefore when I began the Interbellum blog some time ago I decided to base the design of an imaginary fighter aircraft belonging to the Soviet Peoples' United Republic (SPUR) – a somewhat obvious parody of the USSR – on the Gee Bee Racer. I named the aircraft the Rippov-1 (or R-1) and published a picture of the aircraft.

An artist's impression of the new R-1 fighter.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when by chance I saw the following picture of the Nikitin NV-1 ... a real Soviet aircraft that appears to have been based on the Gee Bee Racer!

I thought that I was being imaginative ... but obviously not that imaginative!

7 comments:

  1. There's two ways to look at this; great minds think alike, or you're 70 years behind the times. ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Martin and Jim Hale,

    I would like to think that it was great minds thinking alike ... but the truth is probably closer to being that I am just behind the times!

    All the best,

    Bob

    ReplyDelete
  3. With the exception of the fixed landing gear, this design is also very similar to the Polikarpov I-16.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Gabriel Guerin,

    Its similarity to the I-16 (another of my favourite aircraft of the 1930s) had not escaped me as well.

    All the best,

    Bob

    ReplyDelete
  5. I have always though the BeeGee airplane would make a great little fighter, then on some forum or other I saw that someone had nicked my idea and gone ahead and modelled one!

    So frustrating.

    Tony
    http://dampfpanzerwagon.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  6. Tony,

    Obviously several of us have had a similar idea about the Gee Bee Racer. Mind you, from what I hear a Gee Bee Fighter would have been very difficult to fly, even though it would have been very fast.

    All the best,

    Bob

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for leaving a comment. Please note that any comments that are spam or contain phishing messages or that come from Google Accounts that are 'Unknown' will be deleted.