21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-4.10.5

THE BLENDED WING-BODY CONFIGURATION AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO CONVENTIONAL SUBSONIC CIVIL TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT DESIGN

Kehayas N.
Consultant, Greece

Keywords: blended wing-body configuration, conventional subsonic civil transport aircraft design

Since the late fifties subsonic civil transport aircraft technology has advanced substantially, but the basic aircraft configuration has remained essentially unchanged. It has been put forward that conventional subsonic civil transport design is nearing its evolutionary potential and a departure in the form of a new configuration is needed. As a result, a number of alternative configurations have been proposed. Among them, the Blended Wing-Body (BWB) has attracted most support. In this paper a conventional subsonic civil transport aircraft with projected technology advances is compared with a BWB design. The objective is to compare technology with configuration, that is, a conventional configuration encompassing suggested projected technology advances with a novel configuration at the present level of technology. By means of a simple case study, the performance of thee two designs is evaluated in terms of fuel consumed. The problems associated with the BWB design are also discussed. The case study indicates that the projected technology conventional configuration is superior to the BWB. However, this result is conditional on the feasibility of projected technology advances.

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