Grumman X-29

The Grumman X-29 is an American experimental aircraft built by Grumman for NASA and the United States Air Force, first flown in 1984 to test a forward-swept wing design intended to improve maneuverability and delay airflow separation at high angles of attack compared with a conventional swept-back wing. Because a forward-swept wing is aerodynamically unstable and would twist and fail under load if built from conventional materials, the aircraft relied on a wing built from advanced composite materials engineered to resist that twisting, together with a computerized fly-by-wire flight control system making corrections far faster than a human pilot could manage, and two X-29 aircraft flew an extensive flight test program through the late 1980s and into the early 1990s before retirement, providing data that influenced later research into unconventional wing configurations.