Twin boom

de Havilland Vampire T11 of the UK Vampire Preservation Group displays at the Cotswold Air Show (2010).

An IAI Heron - an unmanned aerial vehicle with a twin boom configuration.

Twin-boom aircraft have their tailplanes and vertical stabilizers mounted on the tail of either two fuselages or on two booms fixed to either both sides of the single fuselage, the wings or the engine nacelles.

The reason for this design choice may be:

To be able to place a cargo door in the back of the aircraft (examples include the C-82 Packet, C-119 Flying Boxcar and Armstrong Whitworth AW.660 Argosy), or an access door Transavia PL-12 Airtruk )
For pusher configuration, propeller (aircraft) or jet aircraft with the engine mounted directly to the aft of the fuselage (Bell XP-52, De Havilland Vampire, Saab 21)
For unobstructed field of view or field of fire to the rear (Focke-Wulf Fw 189)
Twin aircraft, constructed by putting two copies of an existing traditional aircraft side-by-side, (P-82 Twin Mustang, Messerschmitt Me 609)
To accommodate early inline engines and their lengthy turbochargers in the most aerodynamically efficient/practical planform (P-38 Lightning) & (P-61 Black Widow)
To distribute the load along the span into lateral fuselages (Rutan Voyager, Scaled Composites Grizzly, Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer)
To provide for room to carry external cargo, such as Scaled Composites WhiteKnightTwo. Burt Rutan refers to this design concept as "open architecture".^[1]

Other examples of twin boom aircraft:

References [edit]