TELESCOPING-WING AIRPLANES
he notion of altering the geometry of an airplane’s wings in flight to enhance its performance has long interested aircraft designers. They’ve understood that a plane with smaller wings could fly faster, but larger wings would permit lower stalling, takeoff and landing speeds as well as higher altitudes. Over the years many novel forms of variable geometry have been devised to get the best of both worlds from one set of wings. Among the more unusual approaches was a concept pioneered by Russian engineer Ivan Makhonin (sometimes referred to in France as
