Person:John Dunne (6)

John William Dunne FRAeS (1875–1949) was a British soldier, aeronautical engineer and philosopher. As a young man he fought in the Second Boer War, before becoming a pioneering aeroplane designer in the early years of the 20th century, Dunne worked on early military aircraft, concentrating on tailless designs to achieve an inherently stable aircraft. He later worked briefly on a new approach to dry fly fishing before turning to philosophy, where he achieved some pre-eminence through his theory on the nature of time and consciousness, which he described as "serialism".

John William Dunne was born in County Kildare, Ireland, the third son of General Sir John Hart Dunne KCB (1835–1924) and Julia Elizabeth Dunne, Anglo-Irish aristocrats. His later life and career was in England.

Dunne joined the Imperial Yeomanry as a private, before he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Wiltshire Regiment on 28 August 1901. He fought in the Second Boer War under General Roberts but in 1900 was invalided home with typhoid.

Called back to serve a second tour in March 1902, Dunne was diagnosed with heart disease, causing him to again return from South Africa the next year. His remaining career in the Army would be spent on aeronautical work.

While on medical leave in 1901, Dunne began to study the science of aerodynamics and flight earnestly, first observing birds in flight. He was among several pioneers to be inspired by the naturally stable gliding flight of the Zanonia seed. Encouraged among others by H.G. Wells, whom he befriended in 1902, he designed and built a number of small test models based on a tailless configuration. On his return to England for the second time he resumed his study of flight, despite poor health, and by 1904 was ready to proceed to the construction of gliders and, eventually, powered aircraft to embody his theories of flight control and stability.

At the request of Colonel John Capper, the unit's commanding officer, he was assigned to the new Army Balloon Factory in South Farnborough in June 1906 and would remain there until 1909. After months of building and testing further models, all featuring his distinctive tailless "arrowhead" shape, Dunne built a manned glider, the D.1, with provision for fitting engines and propellers.

The D.1 was constructed under great secrecy and, in July 1907, was shipped by rail to the village of Blair Atholl in the Scottish Highlands for flight testing. The D.1 made several short glides during secret trials conducted in the hills north of the village. On the last flight, Capper flew for eight seconds before crashing into a wall and slightly injuring himself. The experimental glider had at least demonstrated the stability Dunne considered so essential. The D.1 was repaired and fitted with twin engines driving a single shaft which in turn drove twin propellers. It crashed on its first attempted flight when the takeoff trolley veered off course.

The D.2 glider, designed in 1907, was a proposed small-scale test vehicle for the larger Dunne-Huntington powered aircraft, designed by Dunne in 1907–1908 for construction by Huntington. The glider was not built but the full-scale craft would eventually be built by Huntington and flown successfully in 1910-11. It has been variously described as a biplane or triplane owing to its odd configuration of a main biplane wing with a large, high-mounted foreplane close in front.

The D.3 man-carrying glider and the D.4 powered aeroplane, were in their turn taken to Blair Atholl in 1908, where the glider eventually flew well and the D.4 had limited success being, in Dunne's words, "more a hopper than a flyer". During this trip Dunne was again dogged by ill health.

Dunne returned to the Balloon factory and began working on his next design, the D.5. However in 1909 the War Office stopped any official support for heavier-than-air flight, and Dunne left the Balloon Factory. He was allowed to keep his aeroplanes. By now, Dunne was also an important official in the Aeronautical Society.

With his friends' financial investment Dunne formed a small company, the Blair Atholl Aeroplane Syndicate, to continue his experiments. Like previous models, the D.5 was a tailless V-shaped biplane, with sharply swept back wings. A central nacelle housed the pilot (and passenger) along with a rear-mounted engine that drove two pusher propellers. The swept wings provided inherent stability incorporating a wash-out by decreasing the angle of incidence gradually from root to tip. Short Brothers on the Isle of Sheppey were contracted to build the craft and it is sometimes known as the Short-Dunne 5. By 1910 the aircraft was completed.

On 20 December 1910, on the Aeronautical Society's flying ground at Eastchurch, Sheppey, Dunne demonstrated the extraordinary stability of the D.5 to an amazed audience that included Orville Wright and Griffith Brewer. Flying using only the throttle to climb or dive, he could also take both hands off the controls so as to make notes on a piece of paper. Then in 1911 the D.5 crashed and was badly damaged.

Dunne had originally wanted to construct a monoplane, but at the time the Army expected biplanes and Capper had instructed Dunne accordingly. Dunne's next design, free of Army influence, was a monoplane, the D.6. This and its derivatives, the D.7 and D.7bis, flew throughout 1911-1912.

By now the D.5 had been repaired and improved as the Dunne D.8. An example was flown across the Channel to France, and Farnborough evaluated the type. Production was licensed to both Nieuport in France and Burgess in America.

Through 1913 and 1914 it became apparent that there was little future in Dunne's designs. Although the principle of inherent stability was proven and slowly gaining acceptance, mainstream aircraft design was now proceeding along an entirely different path.

Dunne's continuing ill health was also making it difficult for him to remain active in aeronautics. The Blair Atholl Syndicate was liquidated in 1914 and Dunne moved on to other areas.

Dunne published his first book, on dry-fly fishing, in 1924, with a new method of making realistic imitation flies.

Meanwhile he was studying precognitive dreams which he believed he and others had experienced. By 1927 he had evolved the theory of serial time for which he would become famous and published an account of it, together with his dream researches, in his next book "An experiment with time." Further works developing this topic included The Serial Universe (1934), The New Immortality (1938), Nothing Dies (1940) and Intrusions? (published posthumously in 1955).