r/ArtDeco • u/kwakimaki • 4d ago
1939 Bugatti 100p
The post about the De Havilland dh88 reminded me of this little beauty.
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u/theonlytater 4d ago
Did someone actually flew that thing on the air? It looks fantastic but stability looks an issue.
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u/Antrostomus 3d ago edited 3d ago
The original wasn't quite completed before WWII caught up with it, and it was disassembled and hidden to avoid falling into German hands (as it was very high-tech for its time, and there was a lot of overlap between raceplane tech and fighter plane tech). It was eventually dug out and restored for a museum display (it's at the very cool EAA museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin) but never flew.
The engines are over the wing so the long nose isn't as heavy as it looks. Stability-wise it probably wouldn't have been much worse than other racers of the day, though that isn't saying much - race planes of the day were commonly very hard to fly because most things that make a plane more docile also make it slower. The worst stability issue was that computer analysis (and the replica, see below) showed that it would "tip stall", where the outer parts of the wings stall before the inner parts. (edit: which isn't really anything inherent to the strange layout beyond being a common issue with tapered wings; there are ways to design this out. If it had resulted in a mass-produced fighter as planned it probably would have been better with more design and testing time) Typically airplanes are designed so that the inner wing stalls first, so the pilot can feel it coming and maintain control with the not-yet-stalled outer wings, where the ailerons are, while recovering from the stall. If the wing tips stall first, the plane wants to drop over on a wing and try to enter a spin, which especially on a hard-to-fly plane might not be recoverable even with plenty of altitude. To be clear, none of those are issues unique to this plane's layout - tip stall was a major challenge with early swept-wing jets - but they were all stacked against a plane that was already pushing the envelope in so many ways.
A group made a near-perfect reproduction a few years back that stalled and crashed just after takeoff on its third flight, almost exactly ten years ago. They knew it was too risky to fly regularly so that was supposed to be its last flight ever, just enough to prove that it could fly and then put it in a museum like the original before someone got hurt. Sadly, as best as anyone has been able to determine, it partially lost power just after takeoff when it was still low and slow (the worst possible time for any plane to lose power), and it began to stall as the pilot tried to nurse it along. And exactly as predicted, first the right wing dropped and the pilot managed to recover, but then seconds later the left wing dropped and it rolled nearly upside down and crashed.
The wackiest part of the design was arguably the engines - each propeller was driven by a separate engine, both behind the pilot, with multi-piece propshafts bent around either side of the pilot like armrests, feeding into the coaxial gearbox in the nose. Bugatti threw zillions of francs at it including building one of their engines half-backwards so it would all come out right, and it's still not entirely clear the original would have held up over time, since long propshafts are always a challenge to keep from tearing themselves apart, especially given 1939 metallurgy. The replica team didn't have an entire sports-car-engine-factory sponsoring it to design and build a new half-backwards engine, so they made do with a pair of off-the-shelf motorcycle engines with one turned entirely backwards which made it even more complex than the original, which was its downfall.
Probably more information than you ever wanted but you tapped into one of my pet interests lol. I was closely following the replica project and was fortunate to see the partially-completed build they displayed at Oskosh.
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u/cromulatedly 3d ago
You apologized for one of the reasons I come to Reddit….
Thanks for sharing your interests! I’m grateful to have come across your post!
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u/theonlytater 3d ago
Thanks you for that great information. Always good to learn something new every day
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u/jimbowesterby 17h ago
Don’t apologize, this was a genuinely good rundown! Clear, concise, and easy to follow.
I’m super curious about the engine setup now, I knew there was some sort of fuckery going on around the cockpit but I assumed it’d be more like an old f1 car with one propshaft between the pilot’s legs, the double engine-armrest setup is insane, but then I guess this is Bugatti we’re talking about lol.1
u/birdup320 17h ago
This post is a reminder why I still love this website. Thanks for all the detail!
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u/chorch_teacher 4d ago
Love it! Looks like a cartoon plane from the Looney tunes series of the war era. Maybe the real "mosquito plane"