Blohm & Voss BV141
Today, a weird aeroplane. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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I so wish you could see today’s subject. But try to picture it: an airplane with no cockpit on its body. Instead, the cockpit is mounted on the right wing. And that wing is longer than the left wing. And the tail: It has only a left side, and no right side.
Blohm & Voss BV141 (image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
You’re seeing an early World War II German reconnaissance airplane. The Blohm-Voss 141. The German Luftwaffe rather reluctantly accepted this strange airplane. It offered one very nice advantage for reconnaissance. The observers could now look both forward and down from windows right in front of them. No engine nacelle to block their view.
And it turned out to be a serviceable airplane. Of course, newer, better, faster planes were on the drawing boards. All the planes that began the war on either side underwent radical improvement or replacement as the awful aerial war continued. This weird airplane flew well enough. And it saw some action early in the war. But, then Germany replaced it with more conventional designs.
Of course, designers had to carefully balance the forces of lift and drag in anything so disturbing to the eye. This was no simple design.
And yet: No airplane is ever perfectly symmetrical. The pilot and the engine of the Wright brothers’ first airplane rode side by side while the two pusher propellers behind them had to be symmetrically placed. So one chain driving the propeller had to be longer than the other behind the engine. And we see such compromises in most any airplane. But, since most appear to be symmetrical, we’re not bothered.
The reason I’m talking about this today is that I’ve just tripped across sixty-three pages of photos of a late version of Blohm-Voss’s unsymmetric airplane. Long ago, an engineer who’d worked on it had sent them to me. And they are a surprise. Only two out of a hundred or so pictures show the whole airplane. The rest are one fragment after another – landing gear levers, structural elements, gauges, ducts ...
The engineer’s concerns are directed toward the mechanics of construction, not the external appearance.
And we realize how much more an airplane is, beyond its outward look. This engineer had dealt with the basic issues that meant success or failure.
This was far from the only asymmetrical airplane that ever succeeded. But, in the end, none ever really caught on. We humans feel a need for symmetry. We are essentially symmetric – so too are our cars, planes, chairs, beds, water faucets, clothing ... We opt for symmetry wherever it’s plausible.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man – a fascination with human symmetry.
Of course, we also recognize the essential tedium of symmetry. Photographers avoid too much of it -- as do artists. That old German airplane reminds us that an odd tension constantly lurks between function and our longing for symmetry.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
Some sources:
Blohm & Voss BV 141 - Wikipedia
Blohm & Voss BV 141 - Asymmetric Reconnaissance From WWII
Why Are Symmetrical Faces So Attractive? | Psychology Today
This Episode first aired June 23, 2026.