GIANT NEW PLANES

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21207, 2 September 1940, Page 4

GIANT NEW PLANES

HIGH AS TWO-STOREY BUILDING The U.S.A. Army Air Corps disclosed today that it is planning for future airplanes three times as large as its present huge four-engine bombers, says the Christian Science Monitor. Such planes, each big enough to fill a football field and as high as a two-storey building, may not be flying for another five or ten years, but aeronautical engineers declared that they would be practical. “The bigger you build them the

more efficient they are,” one engineer declared.

The Air Corps now is completing at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, a power plant laboratory designed to test engines up to 8000 horse-power, using propellors 40 feet in diameter. Private aeronautical engineers said that the size of the airplane of tomorrow is limited only by the strength of the materials in the cantilever wings, which are built like a steel bridge. They visioned the 150-ton airplane as a “flying wing” without tail assembly or fuselage, guided by wing-tip rudders and elevators, with engines mounted inside and driving pusher propellors on the rear edge of the wing. it would be large enough for passenger cabins and accommodations.

Equipped- for military purposes, such planes would be able to carry more than five tons of bombs from American shores to European cities, from Alaska to Japan, or similar distances, drop the bombs, and return without stopping.