This here is one of the lesser-known members of Santa's family tree, Dr WW Christmas.

Let's fire up the sleighbells, neck a bottle of eggnog, and find out what he's leaving in our stockings, shall we?

Father Christmas, of course, punishes naughty children by leaving them a useless lump of coal.

As for Dr Christmas... let's just say the world of aviation must have been very naughty indeed. This here is the legendarily dangerous Christmas Bullet.

The Bullet is regularly and justifiably described as the worst aircraft ever built, and a ratio of two take offs vs no survivable landings certainly makes a strong statistical case.

How it came to be is perhaps just as interesting.

You see Dr Christmas was convinced of one thing: that he alone knew the secret of flight, and that everyone else was utterly misguided despite their obvious success, because THEY ARE WRONG.

These days I dare say he'd be steaming into your DMs like a ferret up a drainpipe.

He was also convinced of other things. He'd been studying aerodynamics before the Wright Brothers! The Germans wanted him to build an air force! He'd built a plane to his own design in 1908 (you wouldn't know it - it went to a different school)!

He'd allegedly had to destroy his 1908 plane as it had hit a tree and he wanted to make sure nobody could steal its secrets.

As there's no other evidence of its existence it's obvious that either this ploy worked or there was no plane. I sort of know where my money is...

By 1909 however he had definitely built a real, genuine plane - the Red Bird - and it had definitely flown.

The reason for its success is often claimed to be that it was a straight copy of another group's design, the suspiciously similarly named Red Wing from AEA...

I've got my doubts - the Red Bird is much more heavily built, ironically for what came later - but patenting somebody else's design is a straight up Dr Christmas move so perhaps there's some truth in it.

I say it's his sort of move because the guy was a genuine psychopath. At some point he "discovered" that the secret of bird flight is the flexible wing.

Here's how he discovered it:

Now I can think of several reasons why a bird covered in cement wouldn't be flying anywhere - although it certainly wouldn't be lacking for motivation - but to Christmas it meant just one thing: wings should flex.

Without even pausing to patent the concrete duck, Christmas set about designing his masterpiece.

A plane that would fly with the grace and elegance of the birds - or at least those birds not covered in cement by lunatic inventors. The Bullet's wing would be free to bend.

To power his plane, Christmas scrounged a cutting edge engine from the US military, having promised not to fly it before they'd checked the plane over.

Fearful they'd ask awkward questions - like "what the hell is this?" - Christmas ignored the prohibition.

In January 1919 test pilot Cuthbert Mills climbed into the Bullet, fired up the engine, and took off for the first time.

The wing briefly flexed as it was designed to do and then collapsed altogether, killing Mills in front of his horrified mother.

Undeterred by this setback, Christmas built a second Bullet, having somehow blagged another engine without anyone asking what he'd done with the first.

Despite his insistence that the initial design was perfect, the wing on this was noticeably stronger.

Regrettably it wasn't any better built. After a brief publicity tour advertising it as the safest plane ever built, it was fired up for its first test flight.

The wings fell off a second time, again killing the pilot.

Figuring he was likely to run out of engines as well as test pilots, Dr Christmas appears to have realised that it was easier to just make stuff up. Imaginary airplanes - like Santa's sleigh - are much better at avoiding those pesky laws of physics.

Christmas boasted of orders from Europe that the Europeans had never heard of. 11 imaginary planes had been conceived, tested, and paid for without ever once existing or money changing hands. In interviews he talks at length about various types, none of which were ever built.

Somewhere along the line it's claimed he accidentally patented the aileron, receiving $100k from the US government for it, though apparently no evidence exists.

He was certainly trying to get cash out of the government though, at one point pitching a 28-man "battleplane"...

Fortunately nobody took his offer up.

Christmas' only future contributions to aviation were lying about his "successes", haranguing senators, and not building planes.

And ironically the last of these was probably the biggest contribution he ever made to the safety of flight...

And now you know why my kids never, ever ask me for a Christmas story...

Merry Christmas, everyone.

PS - whilst researching this I came across the "Edward's Common Sense Aeroplane".

Normally I laugh at names like that, but as there's no record of this thing ever getting off the ground it appears that common sense did, in fact, prevail.