Flightglobal and Flight International have been running a controversial Airbus advert this week, in which the company accuses rival airframer Boeing of "stretching the truth" in a bitter marketing war over their competing A320neo/737 Max and A380/747 products.
Do we care, you might be asking? Well, perhaps unusually for The DEW Line, yes we do, as Airbus's choice of depicting a 737 Max with a "Pinocchio-style" nose made me think of some past military types which have boasted proudly prominent proboscis.
First to my mind was "Snoopy", the UK's former weather research aircraft - a C-130K with a massive, striped red and white "Barber's shop" pole bolted onto its nose. There are plenty more though - the Royal Air Force's bulbous and ill-fated Nimrod AEW 3, Chile's lone Phalcon radar-equipped 707 and even random types, like the Soviet Union's vertical take-off and landing Yak-36.
You can't do much better than the two designs below, however (both images courtesy of the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center's fantastic online photo gallery): the Douglas X3 Stiletto and the "Quiet Spike" modification to a Boeing F-15B.
Suggestions for any other candidates most welcome!
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