Topic summary
Annular wings
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Closed wing.
Pioneer years
An early example of the closed wing was on the Blériot III aircraft, built in 1906 by Louis Blériot and Gabriel Voisin. The lifting surfaces comprised two annular wings mounted in tandem. The later Blériot IV replaced the forward annular wing with a biplane and added a canard foreplane to make it a three-surface aircraft. It was able to leave the ground in small hops before being damaged beyond repair.