Talk:Vincent Burnelli

Difficult personality

I read an article on the Web several years ago about the life and times of Vincent Burnelli, in which he was described as having a difficult personality. He apparently was fairly pushy with his ideas, and unwilling to compromise or negotiate. He presented his lifting body design concepts to a number of major U.S. aircraft manufacturers in the hope of getting them into production, but his proposals were rejected, not so much because the designs were so radically different from conventional aircraft, but because of his unbending attitude. If someone could dig up this information for inclusion into the Wikipedia article, it would help flesh out the story. Even though Burnelli didn't see his lifting body aircraft go into passenger and freight service, the ideas are still being considered and most recently have been revived in the Boeing X-48. —Quicksilver^{T @} 20:24, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

They're not "flying wings"

Burnelli's lifting-fuselage designs are by no stretch of the imagination "flying wings." This is the definition of a flying wing from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: "A tailless aircraft that has the form of a left and right wing joined together at the midline with little or no apparent fuselage <Engineers call it a flying wing, or “blended wing body”. Gone is the familiar cylindrical fuselage … . Instead, the craft has a pair of thick, swept-back wings with the engines embedded inside. The tail is also gone, replaced by gyroscopes and raised “winglets” that help keep the plane stable. — Bennett Daviss, New Scientist, 24 Feb. 2007." As can easily be seen, Burnelli's design is hardly tailless, and it certainly has a fuselage.173.62.11.254 (talk) 22:11, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm not saying you are wrong, but this is a matter of semantics only. Admittedly, this is a dictionary so semantics do have their importance. So, yes, "lifting body" or "lifting fuselage" is the more correct term to describe these designs. Jan olieslagers (talk) 12:10, 27 February 2016 (UTC)