Ask the Chatbot Games & Quizzes History & Society Science & Tech Biographies Animals & Nature Geography & Travel Arts & Culture ProCon Money Videos
fuselage
Introduction References & Edit History Related Topics
Quizzes
NASA's Reduced Gravity Program provides the unique weightless or zero-G environment of space flight for testing and training of human and hardware reactions. NASA used the turbojet KC-135A to run these parabolic flights from 1963 to 2004.
Man-Made Birds in the Sky
Quick Facts
Britannica AI Icon
Adding us as a Preferred Source tells Google you trust our content, so our articles show up more often in your Google Search, Discover feed, and AI Overviews.
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Feedback
Corrections? Updates? Omissions? Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login).
Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

External Websites

fuselage

aircraft
Written and fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
Britannica Editors
History

fuselage, central portion of the body of an airplane, designed to accommodate the crew, passengers, and cargo. It varies greatly in design and size according to the function of the aircraft. In a jet fighter the fuselage consists of a cockpit large enough only for the controls and pilot, but in a jet airliner it includes a much larger cockpit as well as a cabin that has separate decks for passengers and cargo. The predominant types of fuselage structures are the monocoque (i.e., kind of construction in which the outer skin bears a major part or all of the stresses) and semimonocoque. These structures provide better strength-to-weight ratios for the fuselage covering than the truss-type construction used in earlier planes.