French Bréguet Br.1050 Alizé carrier-based ASW aircraft. First flight 1956, finally retired by the French navy in 2000.

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Huffy_too@reddit

I really love French aircraft. They're either beautiful or weird AF. No middle ground at all.

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Huffy_too@reddit

Such as the Leduc ramjets:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmxpib333q17e1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1920%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Db6d93b68351fed175ad1729f7749762986ee624f

https://www.aviastar.org/pictures/france/leduc_010_1.jpg

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Grikka_junior@reddit

The Fairey Gannet’s French cousin? But I guess there’s only so many ways to make a single turboprop ASW aircraft

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Flintskin@reddit

gannet was a twin turboprop! biggerer and betterer than french plane!

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Apexnanoman@reddit

I did not know that such an engine existed. I just looked at a cutaway of it and man, that's a weird critter.

3000 horsepower and 2100 lbs though. I'd kind of like to see someone put it in as small of a plane as possible and do aerobatics.

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Mr_Marram@reddit

this guy put a pt6 in a lancair

He did a dirty though and wasn't maintaining the engine properly. https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/318296

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Apexnanoman@reddit

That's both cool and sad. I'm guessing that he dumped all his money into the plane and conversion.

At which point he didn't have the cash for proper maintenance. When I was fresh out of high school I worked for a crop duster pilot.

Had an air tractor 502 with a pt6 in it. And while the wiki lists 750 horsepower, I remember a data plate on the side of the turbine that said it was like 500.

Either way, I remember my boss saying a basic refresh on the turbine was like $40,000. And this was in 2002 or so.

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Rip_Topper@reddit

and I thought post-WWII British planes looked weird

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murphsmodels@reddit

Apparently France and Britain were having a competition.

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Ceskaz@reddit

We (France) won the pre-WWII bomber category

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England definitely gave you a run for the money though. Half the time I think British airplane designers handed the blueprints to the factory with a smug grin, thinking they'd designed the perfect plane, only to have the guy take one look and say "Oi mate, where's the bloody pilot s'posed to sit?"

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Douzeff@reddit

How dare you say the Amiot 143 was weird ?!

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Ceskaz@reddit

They should have gone full weird with an art deco greenhouse

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RamTank@reddit (OP)

Image just taken from wiki. There aren't a lot of good pictures of the thing it seems.

If anything this looks like a slightly more normal version of the Fairey Gannet. What's crazy about it though is just how long it stayed in service for. Already by the 80s or so it was largely obsolete for ASW, but still chugged along for another 20 years or so doing surface patrols.

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Apexnanoman@reddit

Well, if you weren't having to worry about anything but submarines it would still do the job. I mean 320 mph top speed is slow compared to basically any jet that's not a Russian crop duster.

But it's a hell of a lot faster than any submarine ever built lol.

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RamTank@reddit (OP)

If you already know where a submarine is, then yes any plane can chase it. Trying to find a submerged Alfa prowling around in the open ocean though, it really isn't fast enough anymore. At least with a helo you have dipping sonars, which offers a different type of capability.

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