History
An early aircraft - circa 1926 - exhibiting BWB design principles was the Stout Batwing. The designer William Bushnell Stout, toured the US promoting his aircraft of the future which did not have a traditional fuselage.
The Junkers G.38, flew in 1929. This "super jumbo" airliner of its day, seated thirty-four passengers, six in each of its two meter thick wings, and the balance in the central fuselage. In comparison, a contemporary passenger aircraft, the Ford Trimotor, carried a total of nine passengers in its more traditional wing and box fuselage design. Another example of similar design is Burnelli CBY-3. It had an airfoil shaped fuselage, producing a significant part of the total lift. The CBY-3 however had a fairly conventional twin-boom empennage for added stability.
The Miles M.30 "X Minor" of the early 1940s was an experimental aircraft for research blended wing fuselage designs for an envisaged large airliner. Germany was designing blended wing body jet bombers at the very end of World War II.
In some ways, the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is a design which falls between classic flying wing and the BWB concept. It is usually classified as a flying wing, as the protruding body sections are not much larger than the underlying wing shape structure.
A computer stabilized 17-foot model (6% scale) called BWB-17, sponsored by NASA and built by Stanford University, flew in 1997 and showed good handling qualities.
NASA has been developing, since 2000, a remotely controlled model with a 21 ft (6.4 m) wingspan. This research is focused on establishing the base data concerning the lift, stall and spin characteristics inherent in a Blended Wing Body design. Currently, both NASA and Boeing are exploring BWB designs with the X-48 unmanned aerial vehicle. Studies suggest that BWB aircraft, configured for passenger flight, could carry from 450 to 800 passengers and achieve fuel savings of over 20 percent. Other suggestions are better access to emergency exits.
Read more about this topic: Blended Wing Body
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“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)