The Air Force Built a Jet With Wings Swept the Wrong Way

[00:00:00]This was real. The Air Force built a jet with wings swept the wrong way. It was called the Grumman X-29. And no, the factory did not install the wings backward after lunch. The whole point was to test forward swept wings, canards, composite materials, and digital flight controls. Forward swept wings could keep airflow over the control surfaces at high angles, which sounded great until you remembered the plane was also extremely unstable. NASA says the X-29's flight control system was moving it control surfaces up to 40 [music] times per second. So, the pilot was flying a sleek experimental jet, and the computers were basically underneath the cockpit muttering, "Fixed it. Fixed it. Fixed it." Two X-29s flew 422 research missions from the 1980s into the early 1990s. It never became a normal fighter, but for one glorious Cold War test program, America built an aircraft that looked like it was assembled from a mirror image, and then made it work with math.