NASA validates the genius of unsung pioneers from the past in some of its latest, most futuristic projects.
The aviation industry has always attracted brilliant designers. While visionaries like Kelly Johnson, Ed Heinemann, Willis Hawkins and Leroy Grumman are well known, dozens of other once-prominent aeronautical engineers have been mostly forgotten—including some who developed very advanced designs long before the industry was ready to accept them.
Among those who fall into the latter category are Vincent Burnelli and Maurice Hurel. Burnelli advocated the lifting-body design (sometimes incorrectly called a “flying wing”), while Hurel championed the advantages of a very-high-aspect-ratio wing. Both obtained sufficient backing to ensure their aircraft flew successfully, but neither man could sustain enough interest in his designs to garner major production orders.
Today, decades after Burnelli and Hurel developed their groundbreaking ideas, high fuel prices have inspired NASA to explore seemingly futuristic designs that rekindle their efforts. There are striking similarities between NASA’s recent proposals and the aircraft designed by those two men. Some major manufacturers have also offered variations on the lifting-body or high-aspect-ratio configuration, but Burnelli and Hurel are rarely mentioned in discussions of how those designs originated.
Vincent Burnelli
Born in Texas, Burnelli was only 20 when he designed his first aircraft, in concert with his friend John Carisi. They worked together on several airplanes, including four designs sponsored by the versatile though volatile visionary Alfred Lawson. These were advanced designs for their time, especially the 1919 Lawson C-2, the first multiengine commercial airliner. (And they were much sounder than an earlier project with which Burnelli had been associated, the lethal Christmas Bullet.)
Given the tenor of post–World War I times, it’s remarkable that Burnelli was able to obtain financing to build the first two of his “flying wings,” as he called them. More precisely, these were lifting bodies, i.e., large twin-engine biplanes featuring an airfoil-shaped fuselage.
In 1920 Burnelli partnered with T.T. Remington, forming the Airliner Engineering Corporation to build the Remington-Burnelli RB-1. Its two engines were smoothly faired into a 14-foot-wide airfoil-shaped fuselage, which provided about half of the aircraft’s lift and could accommodate up to 30 passengers. The RB-1 first flew in June 1921, and while its performance was deemed acceptable, there were stability issues related to the way the tail surfaces were affixed to the aircraft’s fuselage.
The basically similar RB-2 flew in 1924. Fitted with larger engines, it could carry up to 6,000 pounds of freight. Burnelli had a salesman’s flair, outfitting the RB-2 to serve as a flying showroom that carried two Essex automobiles. As with the RB-1, the aircraft received good press coverage but no production orders. Moreover, although the control problems had been improved, they hadn’t been entirely resolved.
The CB-16, introduced in 1927, came next. This twin-engine monoplane retained the previous designs’ lifting fuselage but solved the control problem with a twin-boom empennage. The CB-16 (also named the Uppercu-Burnelli CB-300, after its backer) had a 12-foot-wide fuselage and retractable landing gear. Built as an executive aircraft for Paul W. Chapman, president of Sky Lines Incorporated, it was test-flown by Leigh Wade, who had gained renown as one of the pilots on the globe-girdling 1924 flight by Douglas World Cruisers.
An amazing flow of designs followed, including the radical 1929 GX-3, intended as an entry in the Guggenheim Safe Aircraft Competition (it arrived too late to compete). Next came the 1930 UB-20, distinguished by its stressed-skin construction, a novelty in America at the time. On some demonstration flights, a Ford automobile was slung beneath the UB-20, and a mechanic would clamber down to the car at altitude to show how easily its engine started in freezing temperatures.
In 1934 the first prototype of the similar but slightly smaller UB-14 inadvertently demonstrated the safety of Burnelli’s design when incorrectly rigged ailerons caused pilot Lou Reichers to cartwheel on landing. Though the UB-14’s wings and empennage were torn away, the lifting fuselage remained intact, with no crew injuries or fuel leakage. The inherent security of having a sturdy passenger compartment that was not surrounded by fuel tanks subsequently became one of the chief talking points for Burnelli aircraft.
Burnelli persisted with his lifting-fuselage theme, but substantial production contracts continued to elude him. Innately inventive, he secured patents on many thoughtful design features, including wings of variable area and camber, winglets and other elements implicit in the evolution of his original concept. Though he continued to propose aircraft—trainers, gliders, fighters, transports and bombers—to the U.S.Army Air Forces during World War II, they were invariably rejected. Burnelli claimed this was due to politics. President Franklin D. Roosevelt purportedly told the armed services to blacklist the designer because prominent Republican Arthur Pew had financially backed him.
The Canadian Car & Foundry Company built the last Burnelli design to take wing, 1945’s CBY-3 Loadmaster, intended for bush flying. After a varied career that included work in South America, the Loadmaster returned to the U.S. According to some reports, it was virtually vice-free, easy to fly and capable of excellent performance under adverse conditions. (Now the property of the New England Air Museum, it’s the next aircraft scheduled for restoration there.)
Around this time Burnelli found a spirited advocate in pilot Chalmers “Slick” Goodlin. Known as “Chal” to his friends, Goodlin had won his wings in the Royal Canadian Air Force at age 19, but when the United States entered the war he became a test pilot for the U.S. Navy and later Bell Aircraft. He subsequently served as chief test pilot for the newly formed Israeli Air Force, and flew combat missions in the first Arab-Israeli war. During his 7,000-flying-hour career, Goodlin was perhaps most famous for his 26 pioneering flights in the Bell XS-1. He might have become the first man to exceed the speed of sound, in place of Chuck Yeager, if not for his disputes with Bell and the Air Force.
A successful businessman in later life, Goodlin was a dedicated believer in Burnelli’s designs. He became president of the Burnelli Company in 1960, and conducted a courteous but forceful campaign on the designer’s behalf that became a long-standing annoyance to the Air Force, NASA and various manufacturers. For a variety of reasons—political, legal and personal—they refused to accept Goodlin’s assertions that Burnelli’s designs were not being properly recognized.
Meanwhile, inspired by the jet age, Burnelli put forward a long series of paper designs for advanced commercial and military aircraft. He believed his lifting-body concept offered even more advantages for safety and performance with jet engines, and would be superior to the almost universal tube-and-wing construction of conventional jet aircraft. These are the designs that NASA and others are currently translating into “planes of the future.”
In his crusade for Burnelli’s cause after the designer’s death in 1964, Goodlin bombarded the secretary of defense with letters citing how the F-14, F-15, F-22, B-2 and even the mysterious Aurora had all “misappropriated Burnelli technology.” He also demanded that NASA acknowledge its debt to Burnelli’s designs in its research into blended-wing-and-body aircraft, specifically charging that Lockheed Martin’s X-33 technology demonstrator derived from Burnelli’s 1962 patent for his GB-888 aircraft. In truth, the similarities in design and dimensions are striking, though Burnelli’s conception is more angular. The later Boeing X-48B, however, is even closer to the GB-888 design. They differ in the area devoted to the forward and aft surfaces, but both feature the basic lifting-body rather than blended-wing concept.
In another example of coincidental engineering, the April 1995 issue of Popular Science featured an 800-passenger McDonnell Douglas “megaplane” concept on its cover that looks nearly identical to a model of the 1951 Burnelli transport. Goodlin was quick to point out that the McDonnell Douglas proposal’s wing was very similar in its shape, sweep and use of winglets. The engine and cockpit placement were also very much the same. While it is probable that no one at McDonnell Douglas “copied” Burnelli’s design, it is more than possible that a confluence of requirements and technology arrived at the same results.
No one in the Department of Defense, NASA or the aviation industry ever officially agreed with Goodlin’s claims. There were undoubtedly legal reasons for this, but fear of losing prestige also played a role. Chal Goodlin kept up the good fight until his death at age 82 in 2005.
There was an unspoken contradiction in some of the arguments for the Burnelli designs. While Burnelli advocates claimed that the blended wing and body derived from his lifting body, they also said the lifting body’s simpler construction and more straightforward shape was superior to that of the blended wing and body. In all events, credit must go Burnelli for his advanced thinking and to Goodlin for his defense of Burnelli’s primacy. And since the relevant patents have long since expired, it would be gracious of NASA and the manufacturers who seem to have adapted Burnelli’s concepts to at least acknowledge their debt to him.
Maurice Hurel
There is far less drama in the Hurel-Dubois story, but the fact remains that the configuration advocated for many years by Frenchman Maurice Hurel and his financier, Leo Dubois—a very-high-aspect-ratio, strut-braced wing—is now a model for future fuel-sipping airliners. Hurel personally flew his first design, the HD.10 demonstrator, in 1948. Flight tests confirmed that the configuration offered excellent performance and very long range. He was awarded a contract for two twin-engine cargo planes, identical in most respects aside from their engines. The HD.31, first flown in January 1953, had 800-hp Pratt & Whitney radials. The HD.32, equipped with 1,200-hp R-1830 Twin Wasps, first took to the air on December 29 of that same year.
Even as those two aircraft were being built, Hurel’s firm offered designs for several turboprop versions in a competition with 20 other manufacturers to create an indigenous French jet airliner. Sud Aviation won with the Caravelle, which went on to great success.
Hurel adjusted his approach, producing a new version of the HD.32 with larger engines and a single rudder/stabilizer. The original HD.32 was modified to the same standard. Both were then upgraded with the installation of 1,525-hp Wright Cyclones and were redesignated HD.321s. They proved quite effective, leading to an order for a slightly larger version of the design, the HD.34. France’s National Geographic Institute purchased eight of them as photographic aircraft, the first of which flew in February 1957. The HD.34s served for some 20 years (one is still extant). That was the end of production of Hurel-Dubois high-aspect-ratio aircraft, but not the end of Hurel-Dubois. The company went on to become an important subcontractor for major French manufacturers until it was acquired by SNECMA in 2000.
NASA recently revisited Hurel’s idea, developing so-called TBW (truss-braced wing) or SBW (strut-braced wing) designs in an effort to reduce fuel burn. The use of a strut-braced wing on a relatively low-speed transport stretched most people’s imaginations, but some designs went even further, with Corsair II–type fighters depicted sporting a swept-strut-braced wing. A Boeing design in the study featured twin-engine SBW transports with the Hurel-Dubois configuration flying in relatively close formation, a salute to a NASA study suggesting that aircraft flying in formations similar to that of migrating birds would burn less fuel.
Other Ignored Inventors
Hurel and Burnelli are by no means the only designers whose ideas were passed over in their day, only to be revisited in later years. Another is Jean Roche, father of the Aeronca C-2, who served as chief of airplane design at the Langley Research Center for many years and held more than 20 patents. Coincidentally, he was a supporter of Vincent Burnelli. In Roche’s notebooks from the 1930s there are designs for winglets, expressly intended to reduce drag by “virtually” increasing aspect ratio and thus improving fuel consumption. The winglet idea, generally attributed to Richard Whitcomb, is now employed on many commercial aircraft.
Alfred Verville is yet another great designer whose efforts have been largely forgotten. His Verville-Sperry R-3 racer of 1922 was a clean, low-cantilever-wing monoplane with retractable landing gear that bore a striking resemblance to the Hawker Hurricane of a decade later. The R-3 set a speed record in 1923 and won the Pulitzer Trophy Race in 1924, but suffered from engine reliability and vibration problems. Had it been adequately tested, the R-3 almost certainly could have been refined into a fighter that would have revolutionized the industry.
Other overlooked visionaries include Charles Rocheville, whose relatively untutored grasp of design was amazing; Howell Miller, whose HM-1 fighter design also suffered from insufficient testing; and Virginius Clark, whose advanced concepts on materials anticipated the world of composite construction by 50 years.
All these unsung aeronautical engineers shared a vision for the future that was well ahead of their time. And while they managed to attain widespread recognition in their day, their contributions are now all but forgotten. It is encouraging to see that at least some of these designers’ ideas are coming back into vogue.
Contributing editor Walter J. Boyne is the author of more than 50 books about aviation. For additional information about Burnelli’s designs, he suggests visiting the websites burnelli.com and aircrash.org.
Originally published in the March 2013 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.
