It was a monograph from 1972, written by a Soviet dissident engineer who had vanished shortly after its publication. Aris had heard rumors of the work—a radical unified field theory of flight that claimed a properly designed tailless aircraft wasn’t just aerodynamically efficient, but was the only shape that could slip between the coarse weave of spacetime itself.
K. Nickel and M. Wohlfahrt Original Publication: 1990 (English translation by E. Stamford) Status: Out of print; widely circulated as a scanned PDF in aerospace engineering communities. tailless aircraft in theory and practice pdf