Bugatti 100P

This is the Bugatti 100P, a race-built plane designed by Ettore Bugatti in the late 1930s. A team of "aviation enthusiasts" (i.e., bored rich people) have built what they claim is an exact copy and is capable of 500 mph, quite an accomplishment for a propeller driven aircraft. (Piclick for article)



The story, which you may believe if you wish, is that Bugatti hid the prototype in a barn during WWII to keep it from falling into the hands of the Nazis. He was apparently afraid they'd turn it into a unstoppable super fighter. Dunno about that. While it's true the Supermarine Spitfire was based on a race-built prototype, the production combat aircraft was very different from its go-fast ancestor. While it would have been possible to use the 100P as the basis of a fighter plane, it would hardly have been "plug-n-play," and the Germans already had jet fighter research underway in 1940. So... nice story, as they say. I will, however, call bullshit on something else in the Gizmodo article:

Its fueselage and forward-swept wings were formed from multi-layer wood laminate—sandwiching balsa and hardwoods—a manufacturing technique still widely used today but practically unheard of in the 1940's.

Um, no. Not only is it not "still widely used today," but the technique was most definitely not "practically unheard of in the 1940's." The de Havilland Mosquito, one of the highest production and most versatile aircraft of World War II used composite wood construction, as did several amphibious aircraft of the day. Of course, it's Gizmodo and they never let boring things like facts or history get in the way of a sweeping sensationalist statement.