While flashy photos hog all the likes on social media, take a moment to appreciate the grainy, awkward yearbook photos of aviation’s past—the kind where planes were still figuring out what they wanted to be when they grew up. These aren’t just old pictures—they’re time machines capturing a glorious era of wild ideas, fearless experimentation, and engineers asking, “What if we just… made the wings longer? Mid-air?”
Enter the Makhonine Mak-10—a name that sounds like a secret menu item at a Russian diner, but is actually the great-granddaddy of modern sweep-wing jets. Sure, it wasn’t famous, fast, or particularly good-looking—but it tried, and that counts for something.
I’ve always said there’s no such thing as a “perfect” aircraft. Designing a plane is like ordering from a fast-food menu—you can have it fast, cheap, or good… pick two. Every aircraft is a compromise between range, speed, agility, and how badly the engineers wanted to confuse future pilots.
But that didn’t stop Ivan Makhonine, a Russian engineer with big dreams and even bigger blueprints. His Mak-10 featured a telescoping wing—because why settle for one wingspan when you can have several, all in the same flight? It was aviation’s version of those expandable dining tables your grandma owned—practical in theory, questionable in execution.
Did it revolutionize aviation overnight? No. In fact, the Mak-10 mostly proved that retractable wings are a great way to give test pilots ulcers. But Ivan Makhonine’s quirky creation planted a seed. A wobbly, overcomplicated seed that would one day grow into legends like the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark (the only plane named after something with a nose longer than its fuselage) and the Grumman F-14 Tomcat—the jet that made every 80s kid want to high-five someone while wearing sunglasses.
These sweep-wing icons perfected what Makhonine doodled decades earlier: adaptability in flight. So next time you see an F-14—which you won’t unless you’re in Iran where they are still flying—sweeping its wings back like it’s about to hit the highway to the danger zone, give a little nod to the Mak-10—the awkward ancestor who walked so Maverick could fly.
Crock’s Thoughts 