Welcome to Warbird Wednesday! Today we are continuing down the reconnaissance aircraft lane and looking at the XF-11. This plane was a high-altitude aircraft ordered by the United States Air Force in 1944. It had speeds up 450 MPH with 3000 HP engines. A struggle this aircraft faced was its counter-rotating propellers, which posed design problems because of the variable pitch. Howard Hughes, the founder of Hughes Aircraft, played a significant role in the development of the XF-11, but the project faced challenges, and a prototype aircraft crashed during a test flight.