It is fascinating to consider the history of the ideas that contributed to these designs. Time and again, designers faced with common problems of "how to carry more payload with less airplane" have been led by logic and physics down similar paths. Yet we all agree that gifted visionaries, i.e., seminal thinkers whose achievements "changed the landscape," deserve special recognition. Tracing the lineage of the modern blended-wing concept has proven particularly vexing and controversial.

The Wright Flyer shared a characteristic with blended-wing aircraft: all aircraft surfaces contributed to lift or in-flight control. If you fast-forward in time, many other designs bear a more obvious kinship. Consider, for example, the famous flying wings built by the Hortons and by Jack Northrop.

Perhaps the most significant group of designs bearing a strong family resemblance to the modern blended-wing planforms were created by the late American aircraft designer Vincent Justus Burnelli.

Was Burnelli a pioneering genius of American aviation, or were his achievements merely modest examples of independent technical development of "passing interest"? Or did he foresee real solutions to a host of still pressing aviation problems from safety to efficiency as is claimed by his various advocates?

Burnelli, dreaming first of an impractically huge (for 1919) "flying wing" that contained crew, passengers and cargo, cut the center section out of that wing and used it as the fuselage. His first two planes were biplanes, the rest, monoplanes. They all flew successfully, and one that crashed in 1935 (without fatalities) helped underscore the validity of his principles.

Through the 1920s and '30s, Burnelli was considered to have the answer to powered flight. He was regularly in the news showing off his new designs. Famous aviators of the time, such as Jimmy Doolittle and Clyde Pangborn, were his test pilots. His fervent admirers included Gen. Billy Mitchell and, later, Generals "Hap" Arnold and Carl Spaatz of World War II fame.