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Flying Wings (or Tailless Airplanes)
Published in James DeLaurier, Aircraft Design Concepts, 2022
An example of a “pure” delta-winged Tailless Aircraft is the 1955 Convair F-102A “Delta Dagger” jet-propelled fighter. Note that at the high speeds flown by such aircraft as the F-102A, the lift coefficients are very low. Therefore, the induced drag is low compared with the friction and form drag, and thus the low aspect ratio is not an aerodynamic penalty in that flight regime. Also, it is seen that the delta planform gives a compact configuration with excellent structural depth.
Actuator energy and drag minimization of a blended-wing-body with variable-camber continuous trailing-edge flaps
Published in Engineering Optimization, 2020
Dating back to the 1990s, NASA and its industry partners found that the Blended-Wing-Body (BWB) has several advantages over conventional tube-and-wing airframes, including improved aerodynamic efficiency and reduced fuel consumption (Liebeck, Page, and Rawdon 1998; Liebeck 2004). Research studies on the BWB have shown that it can achieve N+2 metric goals set by NASA for its Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) program (Kawai 2011). The BWB showed a remarkable performance improvement in reducing the takeoff weight by 15%, the fuel burn rate per seat by 27% (Liebeck 2004), and dB noise reduction (Kawai 2011) as compared with current transports. Being tailless, the BWB has improved aerodynamic efficiency over the traditional tube-and-wing aircraft. However, as summarized by several studies (Roman, Allen, and Liebeck 2000; Liebeck 2004; Wildschek 2014; Okonkwo 2016), there are many challenging problems for the unconventional BWB design, including flight mechanics and control, aerodynamics, structure, passenger acceptance, ride quality and so on. One of them is to achieve standards of stability and control similar to those of conventional aircraft. Because the tailless aircraft have very short moment arms for both pitch and directional controls, multiple control surfaces are considered for the BWB (Liebeck 2004).