Aerospace |
|
A new aircraft design concept called Blended-Wing-Body (BWB) was demonstrated last week when a sub-scale aircraft flew in front of a group of leaders from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, McDonnell Douglas and Stanford University. The remotely piloted aircraft, with a 17-foot wingspan, was designed and built at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., to evaluate flight control laws and flying characteristics of the Blended-Wing-Body concept. During a BWB, the forward body blends into the wing in a single structure, allowing a significant reduction in drag, lowering aircraft structural weight, enhancing lift characteristics and allowing an aircraft to operate more efficiently and at lower costs than a conventional design with a separate wing and fuselage. Those attending the demonstration included representatives from NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Defense, Stanford, General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, Honeywell, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. The aircraft is a six percent scale version of a conceptual passenger or cargo aircraft with a 280-foot wingspan. In its passenger version, it would be able to carry 800 passengers more than 7,000 nautical miles. And the cargo versions could carry 231,000 pounds of payload more than 7,000 nautical miles. The flight of this aircraft, a testbed primarily for flight controls, is another phase of BWB research that has been conducted since 1991 by a government-industry-academia team. This aircraft's on-board flight control computer automatically adjusts the trailing edge control surfaces, resulting in conventional flying qualities for this unconventional aircraft configuration. The current research contract with NASA Langley Research Center is valued $2.3 million over a three-year period. The sub-scale aircraft was designed and built under the direction of Dr. Ben Tigner, a post-doctoral research affiliate at Stanford's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, with the assistance of a number of graduate students. Pilot for the research flights is Bill Watson of Simi Valley, Calif., an experienced radio-controlled model pilot. |
