The William Horton Wingless of 1951 was a 40 ft. blended wing fuselage with large wing fences powered by two 225hp Jacobs radials with extended driveshafts. Not truly wingless, but essentially a highly-modified Cessna UC-78 with a more airfoil-shaped fuselage than wing, this innovative prototype flew successfully in the early 1950s, but no backers were attracted, and the project was abandoned, with the plane eventually being deliberately burned. There were actually two prototypes built (N87698 and N39C), but the second one was nicknamed both "Swoopy" and the "Bamboo Bomber". It's demise was deliberate and shocking: "Horton had designed the airplane in the early 1950s but didn't have the money to develop it. He then was able to get into a partnership with Howard Hughes and Harlow Curtis, since Hughes obviously had the money for producing the plane. The venture failed not because the airplane didn't fly, but because Hughes wanted to take full credit for the patents and production rights, which Horton refused to do. To prove that money talks, Hughes slapped a law suit on Horton that effectively stopped any further development of the aircraft until this day. Hughes managed to get the prototype and partially constructed production version destroyed. One aspect of the law suit was a statement the aircraft couldn't fly, which a video obviously shows not to be true. At one point in time Horton was put in jail because he was selling stock in a company for an airplane that "couldn't fly" and had several violent confrontations with people associated with Hughes and Curtis because of the law suit and resulting injunctions." An aviation tragedy for such an amazing little wonder...

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