From: augustho@aludra.usc.edu (August Horvath)
Newsgroups: rec.aviation.military
Subject: Aero beauty survey RESULTS
Date: 3 Jan 1993 15:48:03 -0800
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: aludra.usc.edu

Thanks to those who contributed responses to my survey of
aeronautical beauty a few weeks ago.  43 of you submitted
responses, a bit less than I hoped for but adequate for some
purposes.  This note contains the results I promised to post.

According to the survey, the top 20 of the 55 aircraft, for the
whole sample, were:

     1.   North American XB-70 Valkyrie
     2.   Supermarine Spitfire - Griffon (Mks. XII-24)
     3.   Supermarine Spitfire - Merlin (Mks. I-XI, XVI)
     4.   Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird
     5.   BAC/Aerospatiale Concorde
     6.   de Havilland Mosquito
     7.   North American P-51 Mustang
     8.   Northrop YF-23
     9.   Sukhoi Su-27
     10.  Lockheed Constellation
     11.  Northrop T-38 Talon
     12.  Convair B-58 Hustler
     13.  Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
     14.  General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon
     15.  Lockheed P-38 Lightning
     16.  North American F-86 Sabre
     17.  Avro Vulcan
     18.  Hawker Hunter
     19.  Dassault Mirage III
     20.  Grumman F-14 Tomcat

Noting that the XB-70 beat the Spitfire by a narrow margin (mean
score 16.17 to 16.03), I suspected nationalist bias from the 28
out of 43 judges who responded from nodes in the United States.
Hoping to unmask such bias I repeated the analysis for U.S. vs.
non-U.S. respondents.  What happened was unexpected:

              U.S.                           non-U.S.
              ----                           --------
     1.   Spitfire (Merlin)             Spitfire (Griffon)
     2.   XB-70                         XB-70
     3.   SR-71                         SR-71
     4.   Spitfire (Griffon)            Spitfire (Merlin)
     5.   P-51                          Concorde
     6.   Concorde                      Mosquito
     7.   Mosquito                      F-16
     8.   T-38                          CF-105 Arrow
     9.   F-104                         YF-23
     10.  Constellation                 Su-27
     11.  F-86                          Hunter
     12.  B-58                          Vulcan
     13.  P-38                          P-51
     14.  Su-27                         B-58, Constellation [tie]
     15.  YF-23
     16.  Albatros                      Comet, Draken [tie]
     17.  F-16
     18.  Mirage                        F7F Tigercat
     19.  Nieuport 28                   T-38
     20.  F-14                          Mirage

U.S. respondents thought the short-nosed Spitfires are prettier
than the XB-70, while non-U.S. respondents thought the long-nosed
ones are nicest; but both also rated the XB-70 very high, and as
a result it "won" the overall competition.  It should be pointed
out that the top 4 aircraft are all well within each other's
standard measurement error for this sample size, so these results
probably are not very stable.

Although the XB-70 is not the subject of a nationalist bias,
such a bias is present in the list more generally.  The XB-70,
Spitfire, SR-71, Concorde, and Mosquito were universally well
regarded, but every other type in the top 20 did appreciably
better among one group than the other.  Notably, the U.S. top 20
is studded with American types like the P-51, T-38, F-104, F-86,
and P-38 that are evidently not so highly admired (at least
aesthetically) overseas, while the foreign list has more
nationalities represented (the Canadian Arrow, British Hunter,
Vulcan, and Comet, and Swedish Draken).

My survey was designed to control for respondents' familiarity
with the various aircraft by allowing them to leave the spaces
blank for planes they did not recognize.  This produced some
interesting results in itself.  Of the 43 judges, only 5 entered
a score for every type.  The most-recognized aircraft were the
P-51 Mustang and F-4 Phantom, which got 42 judgements; the least
familiar was the Travel Air 4000, which got only 9 responses.
The immortal Stearman received only 17 scores, making it the 3rd-
least familiar plane.  Obviously this newsgroup crowd does not
belong to the age cohort that follows the dictum, "Real Airplanes
have Two Wings and Round Engines."

The 2nd-least recognized plane was the CF-105 Arrow with 16
responses.  You XB-70 fans should really get to know this
airplane.  Like the Valkyrie, it was a big white delta airplane
that flew great but cost too much.  It was cancelled in 1959,
after which there was a massive migration of Canadian aerospace
talent to the U.S., and it occurs to me that since the XB-70
first flew in 1964, there may be some engineers running around
with both the CF-105 and XB-70 on their resumes.  If I find one,
I'll buy him a beer to listen to his stories.

I had originally intended to do a factor analysis of responses to
the aircraft beauty survey, seeking underlying cognitive
"dimensions" of aeronautical aesthetics.  But 43 responses is way
too few for even an informal analysis.  (I tried, but couldn't
get stable factors.)  So instead I resorted to an informal
network analysis, in which the correlations between judgements of
various aircraft are made into a map, showing which aircraft are
conceptually linked to which others for the purpose of drawing
aesthetic conclusions.  The map is very interesting, but I can't
figure out how to post it so I'll summarize it briefly.

I was hoping that the clusters of correlated aircraft would be
interpretable based on visual characteristics of the aircraft
(e.g. delta wings, elliptical wings, etc.) that might contribute
to a hypothesis about underlying aesthetic properties.  This
happened, but only secondarily; the dominant clustering pattern
was determined by functional and time-era categories (e.g. there
were clusters of fast jets, of civil transports, of WW2 birds,
of SAC bombers, etc.).  Some of the secondary clustering did seem
to reflect aesthetic characteristics; transports broke out into
straight vs. curvaceous, WW2 types sub-clustered into
(apparently) radial vs. inline-engined types, and a couple of the
delta fighters broke out together.

Besides cluster membership, the identity of the aircraft that
form bridges between clusters or that fall with the "wrong"
cluster of other aircraft can be enlightening.  For example, the
P-38 loaded with the jets instead of with the other warbirds,
suggesting that it is liked by jet buffs and hence seen as more
advanced than many of its contemporaries; on the other hand, the
F-86 clustered with the WW2 types.  The bridges (aircraft
connected to both clusters) between the WW2 and jet clusters were
the B-26 and P-51 on the WW2 side, and the F-100 on the jet side.
There was a cluster of WW1 types (Albatros, Nieuport) and one of
between-the-wars lightplanes (Vega, Cub, Tiger Moth) sharing a
single member in common--appropriately, the Jenny.  A few of the
"wrong" loadings were not surprising: the B-29 clustered with the
B-47 and B-52 rather than with its WW2 contemporaries, and the
Convair B-58 hung in with the jet fighters rather than with its
fellow bombers.  And, there was a very strong correlation between
the Boeing B-52 and the Junkers Ju-87.  I'll let you figure that
last one out for yourself, but here's a clue: they ranked 49th
and 55th, respectively, out of the 55 aircraft.

The most widely connected aircraft in the entire network was the
Lockheed 12 Electra, which was linked to civil transports (DC-3,
DC-8, Gulfstream), to the B-29 in the bomber cluster, to the P-51
in the warbird cluster, and to the A-4 and F-100 in the jet
cluster.  This performance means either that (1) the old Lockheed
is seen by respondents as a quite advanced type, which it surely
was, or that (2) some respondents thought that I was referring to
the postwar L.188 Electra.  If anyone did respond thinking it was
the L.188, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

Hope you've found this interesting; thanks again to all who
participated.

August Horvath <augustho@usc.edu>

Newsgroups: rec.aviation.military