The Dunne D.5 was a British experimental aircraft built in 1910. A tailless swept-wing biplane, it was designed by J. W. Dunne and built by Short Brothers at Leysdown for his company, the Blair Atholl Aeroplane Syndicate Ltd. Like its military predecessors it was driven by twin pusher propellers, but it had a considerably more powerful engine.
Dunne D.5
Dunne D.5
John William Dunne was a British soldier, aeronautical engineer and philosopher. As a young man he fought in the Second Boer War, before becoming a pioneering aeroplane designer in the early years of the 20th century. Dunne worked on automatically stable aircraft, many of which were of tailless swept wing design, to achieve the first aircraft demonstrated to be stable. He later developed a new approach to dry fly fishing before turning to speculative philosophy, where he achieved some prominence and literary influence through his "serialism" theory on the nature of time and consciousness, first set out in his book An Experiment with Time.
As a civilian pioneer
Dunne in his D.5.
A Burgess-Dunne biplane in the US Army, c. 1917