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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