Every aircraft gets an official designation. Some get a dignified name to match. And then there are the ones that ended up with names so bizarre, so unfortunate, or so accidentally perfect that they’ve become legends in their own right — not for what they did in the sky, but for what they were called on the ground.

From demons and goblins to acronyms that would make a sailor blush, aviation history is packed with names that range from the intentionally dramatic to the hilariously inappropriate. Here’s our tour through the funniest, strangest, and most unfortunate aircraft names ever assigned to machines that were supposed to inspire confidence.

The Goblin: A Fighter Only a Bomber Could Love

The McDonnell XF-85 Goblin earns a spot near the top of any list of absurd aircraft names — and its appearance matched. Looking like an egg with stubby wings and a face only an engineer could love, the Goblin was designed to deploy from the bomb bay of a Convair B-36 bomber, fight off interceptors, then hook back onto a trapeze and climb back inside.

The concept was brilliant on paper and disastrous in practice. Test pilot Edwin Schoch was the only person to ever fly the Goblin, completing just seven flights with a total airtime of 2 hours and 19 minutes. Half those flights ended in emergency belly landings because the tiny fighter couldn’t reliably hook back onto the mothership — the bomber’s turbulence tossed it around like a kite in a hurricane. The program was cancelled in 1949, and the name “Goblin” entered aviation folklore as shorthand for “seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Thunderscreech: The Plane That Made Ground Crews Vomit

Some aircraft earn their nicknames. The Republic XF-84H earned its name “Thunderscreech” through sheer, ear-splitting physical force. The outer tips of its massive 12-foot propeller spun at Mach 1.18 — faster than the speed of sound — even at idle, producing a continuous sonic boom that radiated sideways from the aircraft for hundreds of yards.

The results were spectacular in the worst possible way. Ground crew members reported nausea, disorientation, and temporary hearing loss. One crew chief inside a nearby C-47 was reportedly knocked out during a 30-minute engine run. The aircraft could be heard from 25 miles away. The official name was “Thunderscreech,” but ground crews had other names for it — most of them unprintable. Only two prototypes were built before the program mercifully ended.

Belphegor: The Demon Crop Duster

Naming your aircraft after a Christian demon is a bold choice for any manufacturer, but Poland’s PZL decided to go for it with the M-15 Belphegor. In demonology, Belphegor is associated with sloth and inventions — fitting, perhaps, for an aircraft that represented a spectacular failure of engineering ambition.

The Belphegor holds the distinction of being the world’s only jet-powered biplane crop duster, which is a sentence that probably shouldn’t exist. Designed in the 1970s to replace the rugged Antonov An-2, it was heavier, more expensive, had half the range, and required a paved runway — rather defeating the purpose of agricultural aviation. Over 150 were built before production mercifully ended, making the Belphegor the most-produced terrible idea in aviation history.

The Defiant: The Fighter That Couldn’t Fight

The Boulton Paul Defiant is proof that naming your aircraft something aggressive doesn’t make it so. The RAF gave its 1930s fighters suitably intimidating names — Fury, Gauntlet, Gladiator, Spitfire — and the Defiant was supposed to fit right in. Instead, it became one of the war’s most tragic misnomers.

The Defiant had no forward-firing guns whatsoever. All its armament sat in a rear turret, based on the theory that enemy bombers would fly in neat formations and the Defiant could sidle up alongside and blast away. Against nimble Bf 109s, it was catastrophically vulnerable. In one engagement over Dunkirk, six Defiants were shot down in minutes. The aircraft was quickly pulled from daylight fighter duties and reassigned to night fighting, where at least the enemy couldn’t see how inappropriately named it was.

The Acronym Hall of Shame

Some of aviation’s funniest names aren’t official at all — they’re the acronyms and nicknames that aircrews invent when they think nobody from the public affairs office is listening.

The undisputed champion is the B-52 Stratofortress, universally known as the “BUFF” — which stands for Big Ugly Fat Fellow. The polite version, anyway. The Vought A-7 Corsair II earned “SLUF” (Short Little Ugly Feller), again with a less family-friendly variant. And the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver was rechristened “Son of a B***h, 2nd Class” by the Navy crews who had to fly it — a name that said everything about the aircraft’s handling qualities that the official designation didn’t.

The Curtiss-Wright XP-55, officially the “Ascender,” was inevitably dubbed the “Ass-ender” by test pilots. And the Grumman E-1 Tracer airborne early warning aircraft, with its distinctive radar dome, earned the inexplicable but somehow perfect nickname “Willy Fudd.”

When the Nickname Tells the Truth

Some aircraft nicknames became more famous than the official name because they captured something essential that the manufacturer would have preferred to hide.

The Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber — a fabric-covered biplane that looked like it belonged in a museum even when it was new — was called the “Stringbag” by its crews. Rather than being insulted, Swordfish pilots wore the name as a badge of honor, and the aircraft went on to sink more enemy tonnage than any other Allied aircraft type.

The Lockheed F-104 Starfighter picked up several names depending on who you asked. The USAF called it the “Missile with a Man in It.” The Luftwaffe, which lost 292 of its 916 Starfighters in accidents, preferred “Widowmaker” or “Flying Coffin.” Italian pilots, with typical flair, called it the “Bara Volante” — also “Flying Coffin.” When three different air forces independently name your aircraft after death, the PR department has a problem.

And the Vought F4U Corsair earned “Whistling Death” — not from its own pilots, but from the Japanese, who named it for the distinctive sound its wing-root oil coolers made during a dive. Getting a terrifying nickname from your enemies is arguably the highest compliment in aviation.

The Inflatoplane: Yes, Really

No list of absurd aircraft names would be complete without the Goodyear Inflatoplane — because it was exactly what it sounds like. In the 1950s, Goodyear built an aircraft made almost entirely of rubberized fabric that could be inflated from a container the size of a large suitcase in about five minutes.

The Inflatoplane was intended as a rescue aircraft that could be dropped to downed pilots behind enemy lines. It actually flew reasonably well, reaching speeds of 72 mph. But the military couldn’t get past one fundamental problem: an aircraft that could be shot down with a well-aimed pistol was not, perhaps, ideal for a combat zone. The program was cancelled, and the name “Inflatoplane” entered the lexicon as a reminder that some ideas are too literal for their own good.