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Of course there was one. It had a total of twelve engines. Dornier Do-X over Manhattan (picture source) The largest airplane of its time, the Dornier Do-X was a flying boat with initially twelve Siem …

Of course there has! No air bridge involved, however. This picture shows one of several such performances made for movies or at airshows in the 1920s. The earliest I could find was done by Jim Hester …

This is a really good question. I have to admit that I am baffled by the few designs which use the inverted sesquiplane layout. Possible advantages I can come up with: You can use the same wing desig …

Hindsight is 20/20. At that time, nobody could be sure the ETOPS rule would be extended the way it eventually was. The 1985 extension was a gift from the FAA to Boeing, so US carriers could use the Bo …

What you are looking for are called Phase 3 airfoils. While initial research focused on avoiding a shock completely at one specific operating point of the airfoil (Phase 1, in the 1960s), Phase 2 airf …

US supersonic bomber concepts were studied in the Fifties where the outer wing could be jettisoned. The WS-110 concept by North American shown below (source) sported wing extensions with fuel tanks wh …

Four things come to mind: Geometric shaping for stealth is based on the theoretical work of Petr Ufimtsev, a Russian mathematician who explained how to calculate the reflection of radio waves from th …

So far, the oldest I have found is LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin, first flight in 1928. It used a propeller-driven generator to power its radios and a second one (with buffer battery) to keep the ship illumina …

Disclaimer: I can only speculate, having no direct involvement with the development of the Curtiss Model F. Stick forces were not really an issue with the small and slow early aeroplanes. As both size …

50 years before, in 1855, not even the Lenoir engine, a two-stroke combustion engine which ran on natural gas (saving Lenoir from inventing the carburettor after having invented the spark plug already …

Mitteneffekt The pressure fields of the left and right part of a swept wing interfere at the center, causing a drop in lift. The Horten brothers called this "Mitteneffekt", and it was never properly t …

The A-12 and SR-71 were flat like an ironing board for a reason. This way, the pitching moment at Mach 3+ was easy to calculate. At the time of the design, Mach 3 wind tunnels were rudimentary and had …

The upper wing of the Fokker Dr.I is larger in span and chord than the other two. Adding ailerons on the lower wings would had added less effect for additional mechanical complexity, and on the lower …

Another historical perspective: Junkers helped to found and participated in dozens of airlines in the early 1920s. This helped to boost demand for his products (mainly the F-13, but all started with t …

This depended strongly on the flight altitude. Staying at low level for the full mission meant that the Me-262 would run out of fuel within 40 to 50 minutes. Climbing above 6 km (20,000 ft) would ext …