Sometimes airplanes fall out of the sky. This is an unfortunate fact of aviation. Sometimes it’s because of mechanical failure or pilot error or an errant missile or an errant flock of birds. And sometimes planes fall out of the sky because they are are terribly, terribly designed.

That was the case with the Christmas Bullet, a strutless biplane from the early days of aviation.

The post Well That Didn’t Work: The Plane That Flapped Like a Bird and the Fraud Who Built It appeared first on WIRED.