The cruciform tail is an aircraft empennage configuration which, when viewed from the aircraft's front or rear, looks much like a cross. The usual arrangement is to have the horizontal stabilizer intersect the vertical tail somewhere near the middle, and above the top of the fuselage.
Often this arrangement is chosen to keep the tail out of the engines' wake or to avoid complex interference drag.
Cruciform tails are also used on many kind of airships, like classical Zeppelins.
Read more about Cruciform Tail: Benefits, Applications
Famous quotes containing the word tail:
“In fact, now I come to think of it, do we decide questions, at all? We decide answers, no doubt: but surely the questions decide us? It is the dog, you know, that wags the tail—not the tail that wags the dog.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)