Someone far smarter than me replied that propellor engined planes are more efficient than turbofan engined planes, and who am I to argue?
Although maybe this is some sort of proof -- the following photo is not upside-down, but the A400M (a transporter plane, let's not forget), can loop-the-loop:
A lot of military planes still use propellors.
But one of the strangest is this -- a Bell-Boeing V22, sometimes known as an Osprey:
Those massive (almost comedy-sized) propellors are, of course, a trick, because they're designed to rotate, like this:
Until you end up with this -- a twin-rotor helicopter:
I can't begin to imagine how you could make that trick work, but that explains why the propellors are so massive.
Although while we're on the subject, it has another trick, too. Those propellors can be folded back on themselves, like this:
And then, as if that wasn't weird enough, the whole wing/rotor section can be twisted around to lie parallel to the body, like this:
Obviously designed to take up minimum space on an aircraft carrier, I think that trick is quite extraordinary.
But it's got us a long way from the sexiness of propellors (which, in case you were wondering, is what this post is all about).
I'm hoping the rather fine Bombardier Q400 will help us get back on track.
There's something about that pencil-thin body with the sharp nose that's very sexy.
And, for me, those propellors simply add to the appeal -- there's something visceral and obvious about them, compared with the blank tube of a turbofan or a jet.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that flying is a weird enough experience as it is -- but the friendly propellors seem to make it more explicable.
And they almost make that appalling carbon crime seem reasonable.
At this point I was going to bang on about the oldest propellor-driven plane I've ever flown in, a pre-War Martin twin-engined job where you could see flames coming out of the exhaust, but, luckily for you, I've run out of space.
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