Quick Links Origins, development, and experimental history A follow-up model did enter the skies for a brief time The pusher concept has both benefits and drawbacks Some noteworthy examples of pusher-concept aircraft The 1940s was a unique era of innovation in global aviation, with the postwar period demonstrating a unique opportunity to modify military designs and technologies to create new planes for civil applications. Only decades after the Wright Brothers first took to the skies, there were many technologies and unique conceptual designs which had never been fully tested, and, as a result, had never faced experimental scrutiny. Get all the latest aviation news from Simple Flying! One example of such an experimental aircraft was the Baumann Brigadier, a prototype light transport aircraft designed during the 1940s for mostly private applications.
However, the aircraft was primarily meant to serve as a testbed for a unique kind of propulsion technology, one which has been used by many planes over the years but had never entered the mainstream. A new kind of light passenger plane Pusher technology, in which a propulsion device (primarily a propeller) would be placed behind an engine, originated with the original Wright Flyer but had mostly fallen out of fashion over the next couple of decades. For the most part, propulsion technology had evolved into piston engines with forward-mounted propellers, as can be observed on most World War II-era aircraft , like the North American.