Mechanix Illiustrated, June 1942

Burnelli crash-worthy jet airliner designs

Burnelli History and the conspiracy to keep planes unsafe

Why not put tracked landing gear on the Burnelli STOL aircraft itself?

More of Burnelli's amazing flying wing aircraft!

A huge transport plane snarls down on a battlefield. Panels in the great ship's belly open. Two tanks slide out of the belly like retractable landing gears. The treads on the tanks start rolling--rolling up to a speed of 70 miles per hour. The great plane settles lower and uses the two tanks as a landing gear to touch the ground. As the tanks touch the ground, a mechanism clicks and releases them from the plane. The tanks roar across the battlefield at 70 miles per hour, guns spitting. With a howl of acceleration, the great plane zooms upward again---to wing back to its base for more tanks.

A dream? A Jules Verne nightmare? Not at all. Such a plane is actually on a designing board at the present time!

And the airplane designer evolving this fantastic plane is of course, Vincent Burnelli, from America's Lone star State of Texas.

We say "of course" because Vincent Burnelli is probably the only man in the world who has been visioning such a plane. For the name "Burnelli", although not widely known to the U.S. public, is synonymous with electric light. Over a period of nearly 30 years, Burnelli has been developing transport planes of far reaching possibilities and he has been consistently first in new developments.

Actually, he has been working on tank-carrying planes since as far back as 1922. While we cannot tell you the details of his tank-carrying planes, other than from a patent drawing and our artist's conception of them, we can tell you about Burnelli, himself, and his impressive designs of the past.

Designing an automobile showroom isn't an unusual feat when it's done in the ordinary way. The one that Vincent Burnelli designed was something different, however. It could fly. It actually did fly very nicely with the automobile right in it, along with all the salesmen, the furniture, desks, and incidental displays of various kinds of automotive accessories. But that's old stuff. Burnelli did that in 1925 when the Model T was still rolling off production lines. The flying showroom didn't carry a flivver though, it carried a full fledged Essex coach on its flight from city to city.

That was by no means the first achievement of designer and builder Burnelli. Unlike many figures in aviation, he wasn't born with a blazing, bombastic determination to make things fly. "I just happened to fit into it...." he says. I t all started when he was just a kid who'd learned engineering. He landed a job as draftsman in a Long Island coffin factory -- converted to build Moisant airplanes. The name Moisant has more punch to it when you remember that John B. Moisant was the first man to fly around the Statue of Liberty in an airplane, and then where he started -- Belmont Park, NY. He won $10,000 doing it.

But Moisant's brother Alfred B., who operated the factory, had to lose his young draftsman because the young draftsman was destined to become the design and construction head of a half dozen aircraft companies in as many years. Without knowing it, he held the course of history in his hands when the great Lawson Airliner -- his construction job -- took off with an epock-making load of important Washingtonians. Among the passengers was Senator Harding -- later President, and 16 other U.S. Senators. Afterwards, the imposing list of politicos who rode in that ship provided the deciding votes that kept America out of the League of Nations. If that plane crashed -- well "Vince" Burnelli, as his friends call him, would have become of notable effect on history. But the ship didn't crash, though severe engine trouble developed during the flight over Washington. The Lawson airliner is credited as being the first airliner in the world. It made a tour of large cities of the U.S. starting from Milwaukee, where it was built.

After the event was over, a young reporter made the usual query, "What do you think of the airplane today?"

Vincent Burnelli knew what he meant when he smiled politely and said, "It's just being born."

He had an idea and he didn't give a tinker's dam for the fact that aviation bigwigs called it impossible. He wanted to develop a fuselage shaped like a wing so that the whole airplane would lift. One more conventional engineering job convinced him. The 30 passenger Remington-Burnelli Airliner was the result. Then, in 1921 the fun began.

Burnelli applied for a patent of the lifting fuselage and started building his fantastic ships. Unbelievable as it seems, the fuselage could lift as much weight into the air as the wings. Even though he has amassed bundles of theoretical proof in advance, when the first big ship actually went aloft and demonstrated the point, Burnelli was almost surprised.

It was in 1922 that he first thought of carrying war tanks in his planes. He had already built his airliners with the engines inside -- in a forward engine room for easy attention in flight. Obviously, even with such tremendous weight carrying capacity as his ships had, it would be difficult for them to land and discharge the tanks in the type of country likely to be encountered in wartime. And yet the value of high speed delivery of these weapons was inestimable. Vince Burnelli was determined to find the answer, and he did. He designed he plane more startling that a fiction writer's dream. The patent drawings even showed especially made tanks suspended in the under side of the brad airfoil shaped fuselage. The aperture from which the tank was released would provide an ideal exit for chutists as soon as the ship gained sufficient altitude.

As with all other advanced ideas he was told that it couldn't be done. That didn't bother him because he hadn't planned to do the job right away. "It takes about twenty years to fully develop a good idea," he said. And today in 1942, just twenty years later, he's ready to prove the point. Such great flying war monsters as visioned and now practical may easily add a new concept to modern warfare.

Rough wartime air bases hold no terror for Vince Burnelli's hugewing-bodied air giants. Eight years ago when one of his experimental ships lost its ailerons at 250 miles an hour, due to a mechanic's assembly error, the plane struck the ground at more than 2 miles a minute. It had been flying only 50 feet off the ground in a speed test, and rather than risk flying without ailerons over the crowded city bordering the airport, the pilot chose to risk death in a deliberate high-speed crash. The ship plowed deep into the frozen ground but the pilot and engineer walked out of it afterwards for a smoke. Uninjured, pilot Lou Reichers pointed out to astonished "rescuers" that the cabin was absolutely intact, windows were whole, windshields hadn't cracked -- in fact even the gas tanks were in perfect shape and hadn't leaked a drop.

Clyde Pangborn, world famed long distance pilot, added an almost incredible accomplishment to those already on the list of these strange flat airliners last year. He provided a happy answer to the war flier's old worrier -- what to do when your controls are shot to pieces. The way Pangborn rigged up the Burnelli transport he was flying in war-torn Britain, nothing important would happen if the controls were shot away. He added an auxiliary elevator panel and flap at the rear of the wing-like fuselage and demonstrated that he could control the ship in every longitudinal attitude, even landing, whether the tail surfaces were working or not!

Up to now all these bizarre ships have had only two engines, but a plan has already been completely worked out to build commercial transport planes of practically any size, simply by adding sections to the wing-like fuselage of sufficient width to install another engine and propeller. All the sections would be alike in shape, and each one would contain an engine. Adding sections would make the body wider and wider, until it would carry almost the entire load of the plane in the air. The wings attached to the sides of the giant airfoil shaped fuselage would become relatively insignificant with increases in fuselage width, and function to provide lateral aileron control and lift at landing speed. Anyway, the wings of the ships are designed so that they can be quickly disengaged from the body if the plane should be forced down at sea. The body of the plan then floats like a substantial life boat. Provision is made to release the wings and for a powerful outboard motor to drive back to land. But imposing airliners, air freighters, bombers and tank carriers are not the only aerial advancements Burnelli has conceived. A total of 53 United States Patents and applications and 37 foreign ones have been issued to him. One of the incidental features tested on an early Burnelli plane created a near panic when the ship prepared to land at a neighboring airport. Spectators watched in horror as a sleek pontoon seaplane streaked above the runway, evidently in preparation for an emergency landing on dry ground. Crash cars and fire engines skittered across the field toward the spot where the impending catastrophe seemed about to happen. The mysterious seaplane settled swiftly, lower and lower. A frantic phone call summoned an ambulance just as the pontoons hit the ground. Smoothly and silently, the ship taxied across the field on its pontoons. Spluttering queries from the dumbfounded emergency brigade stopped when the pilot explained it all. "it's one of Burnelli's amphibians -- it's got wheels in the pontoons -- "

When the first experimental Burnelli transports were getting in stride they were afflicted with a contagious little jinx which the designer himself called "aileronitis." The ship in which Reichers was forced down minus the ailerons was not the only one. On another occasion in the early days, a workman in the plant accidentally rigged the aileron controls backwards. The airplane was prepared to fly to sea to intercept the U.S.S. Leviathan 700 miles from New York. The pilot climbed in, took off with tanks full did a half roll in the air and landed the big ship upside down. As usual in the event of a crash in these phenomenal ships, the crew members weren't hurt.

But those big broad nosed planes could do some amazing things in the air too, aside from performing unusual feats. Long before the Ercoupe startled the aviation world with its spinproof characteristics, Burnelli did the same type of thing with one of his transports on a demonstration. Clyde Pangborn calmly took it up a few thousand feet, stood it on its tail in a stall, and relaxed. The nose dropped smoothly to normal, and the ship with its cabin as big as a full sized garage, leveled off and flew on.

It was a ship of this type that provided one of the final steps in developing the tank plane idea. It carried a complete 1935 Ford roadster suspended beneath the fuselage. Tiny foreign cars had been hauled this way by other planes, but this one weighed nearly 2 tons, and had the driver in it!

But none of these things is very astonishing to Vincent Burnelli. He didn't just dream up these planes, he went ahead and built them.

In fact, he built the first stressed skin transport plane in the United States -- and now they're all built that way.

Today, as the Axis stages a worldwide onslaught against the free peoples of the earth, America must turn to the practical modern pioneers of the air to win the victory. The holocaust which Hitler and his partners loosed upon the world may well become a battle of designers, and we've certainly got the lead on that score. We don't need to spend valuable time testing new ideas and proving that those ideas are practical. We know the ideas are practical because they've been thoroughly tested in the air. The developing work on these flying wing designs has already been done and Burnelli did it first.