The public got a good look last week at Britain's spectacular new interceptor, the Gloster GA-5. Photographed for the first time in the air, the bizarre, dartlike R.A.F. plane marks a milestone in aviation: the coming-of-age of the "delta" wing.*
Conceived in the wind tunnels and laboratories of Hitler's Third Reich, the delta wing passed its early years as a kind of aeronautical curiosity, something for designers to toy with when they sketched supersonic planes of the future. Then turbojet and rocket experts began to turn out engines that had enough power to shove...
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