5 Strangest Airplanes of World War 2
Thanks to its rearfacing pusher propeller design, the American CurtissWright XP55 Ascender was referred to as the A special lever had to be included to jettison the propeller to prevent pilots from hitting it when bailing out. The unusual configuration came from a 1939 US Air Corps request for unorthodox solutions to improve pilot visibility and armament space. A strange design for its time, the XP55 had a canard configuration, with a rearmounted Pratt Whitney X1800 engine, swept wings, and two vertical tails that gave it an arrowlike appearance. In 1940, Curtiss received an Army contract for a wind tunnel model under the P55 designation. Although the Air Corps did not like the results, Curtiss decided to build a fullscale model to continue testing.
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