Why the 106 rifle? “We were going to hit targets,” Rice says, “not surround them with bombs.” Twin booms also enhanced survivability, because redundant control systems were in the booms, widely separated. The Lockheed P-38, Rice says, had already demonstrated that placing guns on the centerline increases the shooter’s accuracy. Obsessed with installing a 106-mm automatic recoilless rifle on the centerline, they added twin booms to lift the empennage out of the back blast. It was going to “dive bomb like a Stuka or an SBD, maneuver like an SNJ/AT-6, and be as fast and strong as a Corsair,” Rice remembers saying to anyone who’d listen. But Rice and Bennett knew what was needed and built it in Rice’s garage. In 1961 no one was interested in a small, short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft designed to support troops who were fighting guerrillas. The North American OV-10 Bronco owes its successes during the Vietnam War to the tenacity of two Marine Corps majors, K.P. And if the movies are any guide, the configuration will be flying long into the future: In Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction classic Alien, the vehicle transporting man’s greatest threat is a giant spacecraft with twin booms. Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, the first private craft to take an astronaut into space, and its dashing launch platform White Knight both have twin tail booms. (For more twin tail-boom airplanes and photos of aircraft mentioned but not pictured here, visit Twin-boom designs are still making history. The ones shown are merely a sample of hundreds of designs. As this collection shows, twin-boom aircraft have been useful at almost everything the more familiar single-tail-boom airplanes do. Examining the various rationales for the configuration is a good way to understand just how many trade-offs aeronautical engineers have to make to build an airplane that will not only get off the ground but do something useful after it does. ![]() ![]() Booms have been used to shave weight, stiffen structure, give fighter pilots better aim, improve the efficiency of propulsion systems, reduce parasitic drag, and expedite the loading of munitions or cargo-sometimes all on the same airframe. Why do it? Why shorten and interrupt the fuselage and connect the wings to the tail assembly with two tubes? There are as many reasons as there are twin-boom designs. Even though aircraft with twin tail booms have appeared in every era of aviation history-from the early designs of the Farman and Voisin brothers to Adam Aircraft’s turbofan twin awaiting FAA certification-each one looks like a fix to something broken, an escape route from a corner into which a designer has painted himself.
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