Biplanes: If One Wing Is Good, Two Must Be Better

Prevalence of biplanes over monoplanes was due almost entirely to practical considerations.

Peter Garrison

Friday, May 30, 2025 at 08:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

The prevalence of the biplane over the monoplane was due almost entirely to practical considerations. [Adobe Stock]

Key Takeaways:

While early monoplanes like Junkers' designs showed aerodynamic foresight with thick, cantilever wings, biplanes became prevalent due to practical advantages in generating lift with weaker engines and their strong, easily built truss structures.
Early biplane designs incorporated various features like "positive stagger" and wing cutouts primarily to enhance pilot visibility, though triplanes also saw a brief, ultimately unadvantageous craze.
Aerodynamic design was largely intuitive until Max Munk's 1923 "General Biplane Theory," which quantified the mutual interference of biplane wings, revealing their fundamental deficiency in lift efficiency compared to monoplanes of the same area.

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We associate biplanes with the infancy of aviation, but monoplanes existed from the very earliest days as well. The Bleriot XI that was the first airplane to cross the English Channel was a monoplane, as was the first really effective fighter of World War I, the Fokker Eindecker. German industrialist and all-around genius Hugo Junkers even built an all-metal cantilever low-wing monoplane fighter in 1915—probably the most remarkable example of prescience in the entire history of aviation.

This Article First Appeared in FLYING Magazine

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