ON FEBRUARY 16th 1998, an Airbus A300-600R operated by China Airlines came in to land at Taiwan's Chiang Kai-shek International Airport in heavy fog. The altitude of the approach was dangerously high. Air traffic control instructed the pilot to abort his landing, go around and try again. The aeroplane rose far too steeply, at an angle of 42 degrees, stalled, and fell. It hit the ground 200 feet to the left of the runway, at a speed of 234 miles per hour, ploughed across the central reservation of the adjacent highway and skidded into a built-up area, where it smashed through homes and factories, then exploded into a vast fireball. Only the tail remained identifiable as part of an airliner. All 196 passengers and crew were pulverised or immolated. Seven victims on the ground brought the death toll to 203.
  On January 13 1935, a Burnelli UB-14 setting out on a demonstration flight, and watched by public, press, sundry celebrities and the aeroplane's designer, Vincent Justus Burnelli, crashed at Newark Airport, New Jersey. The aerilons, which permit an aeroplane to bank and turn, dropped off the wings. At an altitude of 200 feet and a speed of 195 miles per hour, the four-ton plane plunged to earth. It landed on its right wing-tip and cartwheeled with such force that it gouged a deep trench in the frozen ground, while one of the two engines ripped from the nose of the craft came to rest 600 feet away. The empty passenger cabin remained intact, its seats fixed in position. There was no fire. The crew walked out of the wreckage and lit up cigarettes.
  What do these two accidents, separated by 63 years, have in common? Very little, on the face of it. One craft was a large commercial jet, the other a 16-passenger propeller plane, diminutive by today's standards. One incident ended in tragedy, the other in a miraculous escape. One factor alone unites them. They were caused by human error. In Taiwan, the captain mistakenly believed his craft to be on autopilot; for eleven crucial seconds, no-one and nothing was in control. In Newark, the plane's mechanics had failed to tighten a crucial set of bolts. Each, once the error occurred, was in the hands of fate.
  Chalmers H Goodlin would fundamentally disagree. Goodlin is a former test pilot, a lifelong aviation professional and the current chief executive of the Burnelli Company. He would argue that, if one accepts the inevitability of human error, the issue becomes not whether an aircraft will crash, but will happen when it does. At this point, the cause of the crash - a confused pilot, a negligent mechanic, a structural or systems failure - becomes irrelevent. Goodlin believes that the UB-14 crew survived by design - Burnelli's design. And that the travellers aboard the China Airlines Airbus died by design - the design of their aeroplane, and of every passenger aeroplane in use today.
  In 1939, the chief of the US Army Air Corps, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, was so impressed with the UB-14's potential that he reported to the Secretary of War: “The basic principle of the lifting fuselage as developed by V. J. Burnelli has distinct advantages over the ‘streamlined fuselage’. From wind tunnel tests already conducted by the NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of NASA] and NYU [New York University] the performance is exceptionally good in every phase. The design embodies extremely good factors of safety - considerably higher than the streamlined fuselage type. In my opinion,” he concluded, “it is essential, in the interest of the national defense, that this procurement be authorized.”
  Dr. Edmund Cantilli, the retired Professor of Transportation Safety & Engineering at New York Polytechnic, believes that Burnelli's design is as valuable today as it was in 1939. “Aircraft manufacturers have concentrated on airworthiness,” Cantilli says, “and ignored crashworthiness. Far too many people die in plane crashes because they have not been given a reasonable chance of surviving. The use of Burnelli airliners,” he asserts, “would reduce air crash fatalities by 85 per cent.”
  This is an astonishing figure. Instinctively, one feels it cannot be correct. If it were, we would all be flying in these amazing aircraft. And we aren't.
  But if we skirt this cart-before-horse reasoning, we could instead ask the question, “Why not? Why aren't Burnelli aircraft the universal standard?” And in answering it, there is an extraordinary saga to be uncovered. The tale of Burnelli ranges from the earliest fairground stunt pilots to NASA and the Pentagon. It takes in allegations of subterfuge, corruption and malice reaching the highest level of American politics.
  Most tales of suppressed technology can be easily dismissed, involving as they do such giddy hallucinations as nuclear fusion, or an engine which runs for 17 hours on half a can of Fanta. In this case, the technology is demonstrably real, and its history is backed up by a remarkable body of evidence. Goodlin calls the stifling of Burnelli, “The biggest story in the history of aviation, and the greatest scientific fraud of the twentieth century.” That's quite a claim. But then, it's quite a story.



VINCENT Burnelli was 24 years old when he created one the world's earliest airliners, the Lawson C-2. It was 1919. He devised this 26-passenger beast in the employ of entrepreneur Alfred W Lawson. In any milieu other than the nascent aircraft industry, Lawson - a onetime baseball player who funded his operation by selling stock to war widows and orphans - would have been a maverick. But sixteen years after the Wright Brothers' debut flight at Kitty Hawk, the aeroplane business was a swashbuckling free-for all, populated by types who tended to be a combination of huckster, visionary and barnstormer. Like the modern, cyber-illiterate opportunists who waded full-tilt into the internet market, they were more concerned with the main chance than with the technology behind it. The cultured and mild-mannered Burnelli, dedicated to his craft, was already a man out of place.
  A native of Temple, Texas, the son of an Italian father and a Canadian mother, Burnelli was a devotee of aviation. At 15, he was a champion model airplane builder and hang-glider. He independently built and flew his first plane at 21, with his friend John Carisi, and had already spent three years as chief engineer of the Continental Aircraft Company when he was retained by Lawson for the C-2 project.
  Lawson hired World War I RAF ace Charlie Cox to fly the C-2, only for Burnelli to discover, halfway through the inaugural itinerary, that their pilot was a different Charlie Cox, a ballroom dancer with a total of eight hours experience in the air. Despite this, and a crash-landing smack in front of the nation's news cameras, the airliner went on to become a commercial success, a trailblazer in passenger air travel. Burnelli, however, referred to it as “a streetcar with wings”. He knew what he was talking about, having modelled the cabin on a tram. It was remarkable that he got the thing to fly at all.
  He swiftly came up with a new idea; a masterstroke which would dictate the form of every aircraft he designed thereafter. This was the “lifting body”, a fuselage in an airfoil shape, like a wing, wide and rectangular in frontal cross-section. His first attempts, the RB-1 (1921) and RB-2 (1924) biplanes, were serviceable but unwieldy. In 1927, he got it right with the CB-16 monoplane, a luxurious twin-engine executive airliner. It was the first multi-engine plane capable of flying on just one motor. Burnelli also pioneered such commonplaces as retractable landing gear, wing flaps and flat metal “stressed-skin” construction in place of heavy, unaerodynamic corrugated metal. There the resemblance to modern commercial aeroplanes ends. Burnelli's planes looked like nothing on today's civil airfields; they were flat and broad, and tended to have a double tail mounted on a twin boom at the rear, like that of a catamaran.
  They were also profoundly different, Dr Edmund Cantilli believes, in terms of safety - and remain so. He cites the flaws of the familiar “streamlined fuselage” aeroplane - a cylinder with wings - in which we all travel, and which has changed only in minor details over the last few decades. In event of a serious accident - most of which occur near take off or landing - the cabin almost invariably breaks up and the seats come adrift, strewing their human cargo like chaff. Because engines and landing gear are usually mounted beneath the wings, where the fuel is stored, a rupture in the tanks will pour this fuel onto the engines and the overheated tyres, ensuring that explosive fire claims the few potential survivors.
  Cantilli claims three major safety advantages for the Burnelli design. They have greater lift, meaning that they can remain airborne at lower speeds than conventional aircraft. This allows them to take off and land relatively slowly, putting less pressure on the tyres and minimizing any crash impact. Thanks to its shape and construction, the fuselage is more robust, tending to stay in one piece on crash impact. The seats are directly attached to the main structure of the craft, and more likely to stay put. The engines are mounted at the front of the broad fuselage and the landing gear underneath it, away from the fuel in the wings, making fire much less probable.
  Burnelli's advances were hugely acclaimed at the time. “In the thirties,” says Chalmers Goodlin, “when I was a teenager, Burnelli was the biggest name in aviation magazines and even in the newspapers. His aeroplanes were acclaimed by universities. So it was rather amazing. When the war came along, why, bang! It was as if he was dead. The military didn't buy any of his aeroplanes.”
  As war loomed, Burnelli had seemed to be unstoppable. He had the right idea at the right time. Come 1941, he found himself sitting in the White House at the invitation of President Franklin D Roosevelt. By Burnelli's own account, Roosevelt told him: “Burnelli, we understand you have the best aeroplane of the lot, and we're going to build a lot of them. So I guess you're going to need some money.” Burnelli courteously replied that this wouldn't be necessary: “Mr. Arthur Pew of the Sun Oil Company is prepared to put up whatever we need.”
  Clearly, Burnelli's technical gifts were inversely proportional to his political nous. Arthur Pew was the backer not only of Burnelli, but of Wendell Wilkie, Roosevelt's Republican opponent in the previous year's bitter presidential election. Roosevelt threw his pen across the room and Burnelli out of the White House.
  Within weeks, a new Army Air Corps report had been prepared, in complete contradiction to General Arnold's. It rubbished Burnelli and resolved, with startling and didactic finality, that, “This design is of no interest to the Air Corps and that for this reason, no further correspondence, consultations, or reviewing of data embodying this design will ever again be considered by the Air Corps or the Materiel Division.”
  Whether or not this was done at Roosevelt's behest goes to the heart of the matter. And certainly, it is hard to see it as a coincidence that the widely feted Burnelli should so abruptly be execrated and shunned. For Vincent Burnelli and his company, the report triggered a frustrating and irreversible decline, and a struggle which would end neither with Roosevelt's death in 1944, nor with Burnelli's twenty years after. The campaign, now more of a guerilla war, has continued to this day, thanks only to Chalmers Goodlin.



CHALMERS H Goodlin is 78 years old, and few of those 78 years have been uneventful. His house in Miami is testimony to it. From the outside, it looks like a blandly Hispanic stucco bungalow typical of the genteel Coral Gables neighbourhood. Indoors, it could be a baronial hall transplanted in its entirety from the shires. Huge beams of authentic English oak buttress rooms crammed with suits of plate armour, one of which straddles a hollow, iron-clad horse. A stag's head stares down glassily from the lintel. Hanging from the dining room wall is an original Tintoretto. Flying memorabilia are everywhere: photographs, models, certificates, testimonials. It is the home of an Anglophile aviator and adventurer, who still wears the W-shaped moustache cultivated by The Few and visible in a dozen dashing snapshots of the test pilot and aircraft trader in his younger days.
  As a teenage farmboy, Goodlin took to dallying at the grass airfield of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, cadging rides and then taking flying lessons. “Flying was a ramshackle business. I was drawn to it by all the strange characters who used to hang around there.” Inspired by the Battle Of Britain, Goodlin headed north at 18 to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Posted to England, and repeatedly thwarted in his desire to fly combat, he found himself training Spitfire pilots in Shropshire, alongside a compatriot by the marvellous name of Bob Constant.
  After America entered the Second World War, frustration took the pair to the US Navy. As Goodlin recalls it, in a New World drawl salted with old-fangled phrasings, “They promised us we'd go to the Pacific on land based Corsair squadrons. But instead, why, they put us in a school in Jacksonville with doctors and lawyers to learn naval history and how to wave flags and that sort of thing. So we were rather teed off about that.”
  Bob Constant had a sister, and Bob Constant's sister had an influential job: executive secretary to the US Chief of Staff, General George C Marshall. The most senior soldier in the land was not above a little inter-service snobbery. “She told him about how unhappy we were in the navy. And he said, ‘Well, I can understand that. It's not a very nice military organization. They've got testing experience, let's see if we can't arrange for them to go work for one of the aeroplane companies.’ So we resigned from the navy and went to work for Bell.”
  Thus, in 1946, “Slick” Goodlin became the first pilot to make rocket-powered flights in the legendary Bell X-1, the plane which broke the sound barrier. “I flew it 26 times. I did have a couple of high-risk situations where there was a fire in the ass-end, and all I could do was hope that I could get on the ground before anything started coming apart. But it was like nothing I had flown before. Amazing acceleration. It felt like I was hit in the back with a big shovel.”
  Goodlin had a handshake deal on his fee for this hazardous task. “I think the Air Force said, well, this is ridiculous, here's a civilian test pilot