The Plane Couldn’t Fly Because It Wasn’t Aerodynamic
More flying research went wrong in the 1980s and 1990s. Consider a jet plane with backward-swept wings and a forward-swept configuration. In a nutshell, that’s the Grumman X-29A.
With hindsight, it’s easy to see why this plane didn’t work out. However, the notion was that the backward wings would improve handling. What was the end result? It wasn’t even close to being aerodynamic. “It was unflyable — literally — without a digital flight computer on board, which made changes to the flight path 40 times a second,” a NASA historian put it bluntly. Yikes.