This week in Patrick Smith's ASK THE PILOT:

A humorous look at history’s ugliest planes, and the rapidly devolving state of airline identity. The “Generic Meaningless Swoosh Thing” Revisited.

“…I passionately submit that it does, absolutely, matter what the airplane looks like. Call me a biased, old-fashioned romantic (I’m guilty on all three counts), but I like to think of the jetliner as something loftier -- both literally and figuratively -- than a mere vehicle, and thus deserving of the same aesthetic seriousness bestowed across a wide range of industrial design. Obviously this is nothing specific to aviation, but a point that speaks to design in general: do we not care what our bridges and skyscrapers look like, functionality aside? Of course we do…”


History’s Ugliest Planes…

-- The McDonnel Douglas DC-10

You may have heard that the Boeing 777 was the first airliner to be designed entirely on computer. What you probably didn't know was that the DC-10 was the first to be designed with crayons and a wooden ruler...

-- The Britten-Norman Trislander

Somewhere in the UK, a group of precocious fifth-graders saw pictures of the DC-10. Grabbing up scraps of plywood and lawn mower parts they shouted, "we can do worse!" A few days later they unveiled the Trislander, which promptly won fourth prize in the school's show-and-tell science contest…

-- The Airbus A320

The A320 was made because not enough people thought air travel was boring. The plane looks like it popped from an Airbus vending machine, or hatched from an egg laid by an A380. It's Airbus’s biggest seller, however, with over 3,000 built, doing all they can to reinforce the notion that yes, flying is tedious and unexciting…

-- The CASA C-212 Aviocar

Here's the answer to why the Spanish aerospace industry is second in global prominence only to its automobile industry. Jealous on both counts, they invented the "Aviocar." …

and the Sad State of Airline Identity…

“… In the end, too many people are left asking the question they should never be asking: “What airline is that?” I hate to say it, but in their attempts to seem modern and progressive, carriers have been undermining, and even outright destroying their own brand identities. In some cases, globally recognized icons were thrown aside and replaced by crude knockoffs.

Most offensive was the retiring of the Japan Airlines crane emblem. This timeless classic – the bird gracefully lifting its wings into the suggestion of a rising sun – became a truncated glob (or, if you will, the “rising splotch”). Almost as tragic was the .......ization of the Northwest’s “NW” compass logo. It was an N; it was a W; it was a compass pointing toward the northwest. It was all of those things, and perhaps the single best trademark ever created by Landor Associates. The new version is neither and N nor a W. It’s just an arrow sticking out of a circle… “

Click here for the full story (and accompanying photos of the above designs) ...

http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/...skthepilot288/

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