Yea, the A-10 is another favorite. All the appeal of a folding pack shovel (er... entrenching tool), built to do a dirty job under the worst possible circumstances, and survive to do it again the next day. Ugly as heck but oh so functionally elegant.
It's nice that the Viggen looks both beautiful AND badass
*thread hijack alert*
BTW, I'm convinced that part of the reason Boeing's JSF entry wasn't chosen is because that plane was far too ugly to fly. That thing looked like an aborted whale fetus. Usually an ugly piece of military hardware was driven to that condition by an extreme design requirement, but the Boeing JSF had no good reason for looking so ugly. Regardless of how it would have performed, pilots and maintainers alike would have cringed every time they so much as glanced in it's general direction.
There was a whole generation of British planes that were the same... The brits seem to tread on the fine line between elegant beauty and picasso-like horror every time they design an aircraft. Thank goodness they're buying the eurofighter next, but even that looks a bit like a tonka-truck with wings. It's too bad they couldn't combine the spitfire with the concorde to come up with another beautful world-beating fighter. Maybe sometime in the next milennium.
The gripen and rafale... Works of art. I'm not convinced that they're not steps backwards in some important areas, but they're near the apex of elegant non-stealthy fighter aircraft design.
