7 Planes Perfectly Designed (To Kill The People Flying Them)

Low on airports and resources, and destined to lose and spend the next century as the go-to villain for lazy sci-fi writers, the Nazis needed a plane that could turn the tables. The Natter promised to be that plane. And it lied.

Instead of taking off from a conventional runway, the Natter saved space and time by being launched with rockets off a vertical structure. Once in the air, it would take down enemy aircraft with its own weapons before ejecting both the pilot and its rocket engine. Its cheap build was mostly wood, and it had a wingspan of only about 12 feet. And because there was no landing or takeoff, the pilot (supposedly) needed no training to fly!

What could possibly go wrong?

The only problem ...

OK, let's review: The plan was to take a tiny wooden plane with a wingspan shorter than a Mini Cooper, power it with rockets capable of over 4,000 pounds of thrust, aim it straight up into the air, pilot it with some random dude not considered a good enough pilot to fly a regular plane, and send the whole rig careening off into the clouds at 500 mph.

Oh, and its weapons? Thirty-six unguided rockets. Because if you're going to base an airplane on what's basically a suicidal mad-lib rocket and have it flown by whoever called "not it" last, you might as well throw three dozen more rockets into the mix.

"More rockets! -- Hitler"

The amazing thing is that, from the day the idea was first mentioned in the Nazi "Increasingly Ludicrous Ideas Proposal Meetings," it was designed, built and given its first test flight just six months later. Most people spend longer deciding on cell phone providers than the Nazis did planning this rocket-fueled disaster.

It was the T-Mobile of fighter planes.

And because the war made supplies hard to come by, huge corners were cut in its construction. Like an eight-year-old pasting together models, the Nazis made the Natter out of wood and glue because, hell, at this point they're just making their "pilots" a flying coffin anyway. They also couldn't afford to make an ejection seat, instead letting the (and we cannot stress this enough) woefully unready pilot unbuckle himself and leap out while going over 600 mph, but not before opening the canopy held on by an old furniture hinge.

The first and only manned test flight ended when the canopy ripped off in mid-flight, striking the pilot in the head and sending the plane screaming into the ground. Finally seeing the ridiculousness of the Natter's design, the Nazis abandoned this aircraft for good ... but not before building 36 more for immediate use.

Those wacky Nazis. When will they learn?

Almost all of them were intentionally destroyed not for their insanity, but because the Nazi designers feared the Americans would steal this awesome technology. The question of why the Americans would want to steal the designs for a plane that killed more of its own crew than any enemies is the main reason why Hitler's brain is preserved in a jar to this day.

The Red Baron flew it, racked up over a dozen kills, painted it red and made it one of the most iconic fighter planes in history. The final redesign, that is.

The only problem ...

There were problems with the early designs. No big deal. It could just, you know, literally melt the pilot's face off.

Face-melting ain't nothin' but a thing.

The plane's radiator was mounted directly above the pilot's head. Though this made it aerodynamic, any slight damage caused it to shoot its boiling contents straight into the pilot's face.

Imagine it like a clown getting hit in the face with a pie at the end of a joke, except instead of pie, it's a lava-hot, face-melting stream of water, and instead of a clown, it's a surprised pilot hundreds of feet in the air, and instead of being at the end of a joke, it was every time its wings cracked, which was all the time, thanks to another flaw that caused the wings to fail at high speeds.

Typical German pilot, circa 1916

In fact, the first draft of the Albatros D-III nearly succeeded in something thousands of men before it had failed at: killing the Red Baron. He suffered the wing-cracking problem during a flight and managed to land (many other pilots weren't so lucky) and refused to fly the damned thing until they fixed the design. This is a guy who routinely flew through thunderstorms and enemy territory to fight nearly a hundred battles against superior forces, and he felt spending another second flying in the D-III was too dangerous.

The Kalinin K-7 was no exception. Measuring over 92 feet long, it had a 174-foot wingspan, making it bigger than the B-52. It had seven engines, seven gunners and 12 crew members were needed to keep the behemoth in the air.

Sup, comrades.

The Soviets planned to use the massive K-7 as a bomber, a cargo plane and, upon Stalin's bafflingly hypocritical request, a luxury high-end transport for VIPs. And because it could fit 120 people on board, the Soviets planned to drop bombs, paratroopers or even a goddamned tank out of it.

The only problem ...

There's a concept taught in middle school science called "resonance." If the right frequency is emitted, an object will resonate sympathetically. The designers of the K-7 were not familiar with this concept and equipped it with engines that hummed at the same frequency as the plane. On the K-7's maiden voyage, its tail shook like it was trying to escape from the rest of the craft, and the pilots were forced to land it before it fell apart.

"Perhaps if we made it larger ..."

Luckily, using the keen attention to detail that Stalin-era Russia was known for, the engineers sought out a subtle, elegant solution to the K-7's aerodynamic flaws ... oh, wait, no, they just haphazardly grabbed steel beams and welded the tail on. Carnies show more care repairing their dragon wagons with gum and duct tape than the Soviet engineers did fixing the K-7. Certain that this would be enough to fix that pesky wobbling tail, they held another test flight. We'll give you one guess as to how that turned out.

After the tail vibrated itself off, the airplane plunged straight into the ground. Upon seeing the colossal failure that was the K-7, Stalin understood and forgave its designer, Konstantin Kalinin. But not before arresting and executing him as an enemy of the state.

And that was the last time a Soviet engineer ever cut corners.

This probably wouldn't have been catastrophic if they hadn't then decided to remove all armor from the plane as well, basically turning the aircraft into a flying flask of explosives that'd ignite at the slightest provocation.

The Americans quickly realized one shot was enough to convert the Betty into a portable fireworks show. It quickly earned the nickname "the One-Shot Lighter."

That had to have inspired confidence in anyone looking down from one of these from several thousand feet in the air.

The only problem ...

If you trained 100 monkeys to build planes and gave them only the instructions "We want our pilots dead, and fast," they still wouldn't have come up with something as artfully stupid as the He-162.

It was the first aircraft made under the "throwaway fighter" concept in which it, after being flown, could be simply thrown away like a used condom. When wartime resources are scarce, cheapness is usually a good thing, but it seems like the Nazis had a "How to Fail" checklist that they followed with unbridled enthusiasm:

1. Have your jet-powered nightmare capable of over 1,700 pounds of thrust assembled by random townsfolk? Check.
2. Have it made of plywood crudely glued together with adhesives that not only didn't work but were actually acidic to the wood? Check.
3. Hilariously rush the design and construction process to guarantee no hope of safety? How about going from the first plan to the first prototype in less than 90 days? Double-check.

Also, the cockpit had a liquor cabinet.

The slightly corrosive, highly terrible glue caused a piece of the nose cone to come off during the first flight. Rather than halt production for even a day to fix this problem, the Nazi engineers, boldly laughing in the faces of safety, logic and even sanity, demanded that production continue. The second test flight began to show the plane's reckless instability and ludicrously difficult controls before a piece of the wing separated from the jet entirely, causing it to lurch into the ground.

While the plan was still to use barely trained Hitler Youth to pilot this jet-fueled death machine, it was like grabbing a group of toddlers from the go-cart track to pilot a fleet of Millennium Falcons while solving Rubik's Cubes: the He-162's controls were too insanely complicated for all but the most experienced pilots.

Now, while we can all admit this would've been the recipe for a truly terrible plane, it just wasn't Nazi terrible. Their solution?

Yes, that's a jet engine intake, and yes, it's right behind the pilot's ejector seat. And with its absurdly low 30 minutes of fuel capacity (Thirty minutes! Unless you're bombing your own base, good luck with that one), that was kind of a big deal. During the He-162's combat debut in April, 1945, 13 of the planes were lost, though only two were the result of enemy attack.

Oh, look! Some neighborhood kids built a pinewood derby car for Boy Scouts, and they made it look like a WWII-era plane? Adorable!

The only problem ...

The suicidally insane FI 103R "Reichenberg" was proof that the Nazis weren't just bad at designing planes; they just really fucking hated their pilots. The Reichenberg started out as the Fieseler FI 103-V-1, or "the Flying Bomb." The entire concept of the plane was born essentially when a Nazi looked at a projectile missile and asked, "How can we strap one of our own pilots to that thing?"

Nazis weren't big on the whole "valuing human life" thing.

Their answer was to crudely attach a plywood bucket seat into a newly hollowed-out cockpit small enough to house a Chilean miner. The newly piloted bomb launched from a larger aircraft like a Protoss Carrier, then the pilot would steer toward his target until the last possible moment, at which point he'd presumably eject. And if he had somehow survived thus far, the pilot would almost immediately be sucked back into the pulse-jet engine intake, positioned right behind his head.

Flying the Reichenberg was so dangerous that its "volunteers" were required to sign contracts stating they understood it was suicide. All in all, it was estimated that the pilot's chance of survival was less than one percent.

"... Shotgun?"

For more baffling vehicles, check out 6 Transportation Innovations More Baffling Than The Segway and 18 Hilarious Modes of Transport Science Gave Up On Too Soon.

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