[jabl]

Horizontal stabilizers above the rudder went away with the engines mounted on the body in the back, the reason for the high tail was to keep the elevators away from the jet blast of the engines.

As to why create a design like that in the first place, I don't know. My understanding is that the 'engines under the wings' layout won because with the engines in the back the fuselage needs to be stronger (and thus heavier) to support the engines.

(Business jets tend to still have the engines in the back layout, because mounting the engines high allows shorter landing gear so that a stair that is part of the door is enough to board the plane, no need for an external stair. But that's not much of a consideration for a passenger plane operating out of airports with infrastructure available.)

[ramesh31]

A lot of the reasoning for business/regional jets maintaining the high tail mount engine layout is FOD avoidance. Operating out of shorter runways/smaller airports this becomes an issue.

[jabl]

Isn't much FOD ingestion due to the wheels kicking up something? If so, mounting the engines in the back seems like a bad idea, as even if they are higher up than an under wing mounting there's a risk that the wheels might kick up some debris?

See also SAS flight 751, where ice broke off from the wings and were ingested into the engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines_System_F...

From a FOD perspective, in my admittedly very non-expert opinion the best location would be to have either a high mounted wing with engines in the traditional under wing position, or then engines above the wings like the Honda business jet?

[lstodd]

Something like An-72.

But maintenance becomes a bitch, so they put'em back under the wings eventually.