SNCASE SE.1010: Aiming way too high.

This smooth four-engined beauty started its life in 1945 with a stratospheric transatlantic postal aircraft project, the SE.1000. That was the time of France’s hasty technological catching up fever. Modified by  SNCASE, the design became a high-altitude survey aircraft to be operated by the Institut Géographique National. The prototype made its maiden flight in Nov. 1948, but less than a year later it was lost in a tragic crash. That meant the end of the whole program and the three production examples in construction were not completed. The ambitious military and civilian derivatives envisaged never left the drawing board.

Warming up its four Gnome-Rhône 14R engines at Marignane, early 1949.
You could almost hear the roar.