Meet The Ilyushin IL-102, The Most Gorgeously Ugly Combat Jet Ever

Foxtrot Alpha ^ | 07/11/2014 | Tyler Rogoway

[Stosh]

Beautiful - thanks for the pic (and the free lesson!)

[Mycroft Holmes]

The trick is finding the image isolated from everything else. That one was through a couple of layers of indirection. First Wikipedia, then click the link which goes to a photo gallery, then right click over the image and Open Image in New Tab to get the naked image only. The URL was a little odd too, you don't usually see .jpg as part of a directory name. Appears to work though.

[jmacusa]

Yeah, that caught my eye too. What the heck though, are they going to mount an 12.7mm out of it? This isn’t WW2. A heat seeking missile can shoot this thing out of the sky from ten miles out. No machine gun is going to do you any good.

[jmacusa]

Yeah, it does. Something like what NASA engineers used to call ‘’water heater technology’’. Parts of various stuff kinda cobbled and banged together with pop rivets, screws, chewing gum or whatever and painted with that sickly pea green color. “Hey Yuri fly airplane, is good’’.

[GreyFriar]

I think this is a scale reduction built in the last 20 years, rather than a full size replica. There is a full size & authentic Stuka hanging from the ceiling of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. It has been there since the 1950s. along with a Battle of Britain Spitfire.

[X-spurt]

Right after Desert Storm, when Barksdale still had a bunch of A-10s, the pilots we knew loved the Wart Hog.

One of our neighbors was in on the “Road of Death shoot em up” during the escape from Kuwait, he said it was the most fun he ever had.

[tbpiper]

Code name "Fugly"?