Leonard Warden Bonney (December 4, 1884 – May 4, 1928) was a pioneering aviator with the Wright brothers.

The same year he started designing and constructing in Garden City, New York, a novel plane with duraluminum folding gull-like wings and a side-by-side cockpit.

A 1928 issue of Time magazine described the unusual aircraft:[3] It was fat in body with graceful curving wings.

Bonney followed the bird principle, abandoned the aileron, or balancing contrivance which airplane designers have always considered an essential feature of stability in the air.

His plane had new features: an expanding and contracting tail, like a blackbird's, for varying loads; variable camber in the wings, so that they could flatten out like a gull's when flying level; a varying angle of incidence to its wings, so that they could turn sideways into the wind on landing... Bonney was killed on May 4, 1928, during the maiden flight of the Bonney Gull when the aircraft nosedived into the ground from about 50 feet (15 m) of altitude, seconds after taking off from Curtiss Field, Long Island.