It's amusing, charming, romantic -- and possibly embarrassing -- that the very premise of lift, the most basic kernel of flight itself, is debatable in 2004. "But either way," I once wrote, "it's all in the wing."

Wrong again. When I dared state the implausibility of an airplane flying with a missing wing, I was promptly sent a photo of an Israeli Air Force F-15 fighter that managed a safe touchdown after its entire right wing had been torn away during a combat exercise. McDonnell Douglas, maker of the F-15, dispatched a team of engineers to have a look at the miracle plane and concluded that the jet's wide, flat body and powerful rudders were able to provide just enough control to allow the survivable emergency landing. Difficult enough for an F-15, and -- here we go -- a full 100 percent impossible when applied to your civilian passenger plane.

For ease in sorting my mail, please include the word "bullshit" in your subject line.

Truth be told, nearly anything from a Frisbee to a cannonball can be hurled through the air, often with a surprising degree of grace. Arcing across the sky and flying, however, are, different things, the latter implying an aircraft's ability to maneuver and remain aloft on more or less its own terms. In accomplishing this, we're accustomed to a traditional layout -- the tubular fuselage, the rear stabilizers and the cantilever wing. Our image of the airplane is thus universally conventional, identically replicated by every 5-year-old's doodlings or the rote memory of folding a paper airplane. Yet wild variations on this orthodoxy are not only possible but proven.

Already mentioned is the B-2, essentially a modernized version of some decades-old "flying wing" prototypes. We have the airplane and airfoil as a single, integrated unit. Short of a dearth of window seats, there is nothing inherent to this shape that outright precludes a commercial adaptation. It ain't for lack of imagination that we don't have one. Engineers have submitted passenger-carrying proposals. Making it impractical are eight decades of entrenched civil aviation mindset and infrastructure.

A variant of the flying wing is the "lifting body," employing a more blended wing and fuselage. Look carefully and shades of these applications can be noticed in existing civilian models. The Shorts 330 and 360, a pair of commuter turboprops built in Northern Ireland, borrow from the lifting-body concept to aid their stubby wings. Note also how the 330 uses a twin-tail design, seen from time to time and prompting a question for Willie: Will a Shorts 330 remain airborne if one of its two tails falls off?

If you haven't noticed thus far, appreciating some of flight's more exotic potentials dictates a journey past Ask the Pilot's carefully monitored DMZ. Combat aviation is generally off-limits in this space, but I'm allowing a temporary excursion.

For the record, my general infatuation with airplanes has included one or two from the armed forces realm. My favorites as a kid, replicated in scale from the boxes of Revell and Monogram, were the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom and the Boeing B-52 bomber. The Phantom, a staple of the Vietnam War and one of the sexiest planes ever made, is a rare breed nowadays, but the eight-engine B-52, itself a 48-year-old design, continues to pull its weight over Afghanistan and the Middle East. A B-52 was the star of Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), if that helps you to picture one.

(Getting back to the B-2 for a moment: Is it just me, or does this plane look like it just flew out of the pages of Revelation? Am I the only one creeped out? Only the F-117, perhaps, is more fiendishly apocalyptic.)

Aviation, like many other industries, is rich with civilian-military crossovers. The 747 was originally conceived as a military transport; early Soviet passenger liners descended from bombers. Perhaps more intriguingly, it can work the other way too: The U.S. Air Force's KC-10 refueler is an adaptation of the civilian DC-10. The 767 is also in line to become a refueling platform. Lockheed's P-3 Orion, more than 200 of which are still used by the U.S. Navy, emerged from the L-188 Electra. The Brits turned their Comet and VC10 into a maritime patrol vessel and tanker respectively, while Boeing just announced that its 737 will become a naval patrol bomber.

And so on.

It remains to be seen how radically different commercial airliners of the next century will look. And be forewarned that pleasant aesthetics and efficient aerodynamics are at times mutually exclusive. Those who've seen renderings of Boeing's upcoming 7E7 Dreamliner will note its eccentric, to put it politely, appearance. It has "a forehead like a porpoise," one wag put it. Consider also the cartoonish blended winglets of the 737-800.

Then again, the A380, the new Airbus behemoth preparing for debut in 2006, is pretty damn unattractive -- and conventional.

Just how revolutionary can we get? Well, have a look at this, and be certain to watch the videos, which I assure you are not fakes.

Great fun, but deserving of a disclaimer. Is there really such a thing as a flying lawn mower? Sure, so long as it's not really a lawn mower. Look closely and you'll discover a lightweight airfoil body and a "handle" that acts as a vertical and horizontal stabilizer. The entire machine is carefully balanced and arranged -- if not elegantly so -- to fly. Though only a toy, it's an aircraft, not a mower. Rigging a propeller to your John Deere will not have the same results and is liable to hurt somebody.

"Air does not yield to style," an aircraft designer once said. What it does yield to, as we can see, depends mostly on our imagination.

Icarus had it all wrong, but others, maybe, were on the better track. It's without irony that for years the logo for All Nippon Airways depicted Leonardo da Vinci's 16th century "helicopter" design -- a corkscrewing flying machine that, while an impressive statement of the artist's vision and intellect, could never get off the ground.

Or could it?

It's best I remain clear of certain blanket statements from this point on. Can a lawn mower fly? Can a plane stay in the air without wings or a tail? I'm keeping my mouth shut, lest I crank up the mental wind tunnels of all the aerodynamic free thinkers out there.

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

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