The Amazing Antonov A-40: A Flying Tank  When it comes to war,
innovation is key and WWII saw more insane ideas and weapons of
war developed than perhaps any before it. One of the more
surreal was the Antonov A-40, colloquially known as the tank
that could fly!  Known in Russia as the, крылья танка
(literally, "Winged Tank"), the Antonov A-40 was the end result
of one, Oleg Antonov, wondering how Russians could get a fully
laden tank onto a battlefield without exposing a plane to enemy
fire on the ground.  Previous to this, they had already
experimented with strapping T-37 light tanks and T-27 tankettes
to bombers as a means of transporting them as early as 1935.
However, both tanks were simply too small to do much damage in
combat and risking an entire TB-3 bomber to put one of these
tanks into battle simply wasn't worth it.  The Russians also
experimented with simply dropping tanks (with and without
parachutes) out of planes to see what would happen. As you might
have guessed, that didn't exactly work out.