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.

In aeronautics, a tailless aircraft is an aircraft with no other horizontal aerodynamic surface besides its main wing. It may still have a fuselage, vertical tail fin, and/or vertical rudder.