"Every airplane is a collision between the ideal and the practical. Arrayed against the ideal have been the recalcitrance of construction materials; the need to accommodate passengers and cargo; the requirement of landing gear; and the messy and awkward need for propulsion, with its attendant demands for ground clearance, cooling, serviceability, and so on. The challenge for manufacturers was to marry the ideal shapes of the laboratory to the practical requirements of transport and battle. The mark of a great aeronautical designer has always been an ability, not to carry one characteristic to an extreme, but to combine a number of conflicting elements into a successful whole. There was never just one solution to the puzzle: If there had been, there would have been, in the end, just one perfect airplane."

'The Perfect Airplane Wing' by Peter Garrison, Smithsonian Air and Space March 2019.

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Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Peter Allen (aka 'Flitzer') for permission to use his excellent images as background to this site.
Most particular thanks to Geoff Sinclair for considerable help on production details, particularly from the 1930s and 40s, in addition to Australian information (and occasionally 'keeping me honest'!), to Ralph Pegram with invaluable information from the Royal Aero Club Archives and to Pascal Brugier for catching my errors in civil production details.