Let us discuss about a revolutionary new aircraft design which has been an aerospace dream for the last 70 years.
I talking about the Blended Wing Body, where the entire body of the structure ensures provides the lift instead of just the wings in a typical commercial aircraft. The best aircraft which has implemented this design the stealth bomber B2 – spirit of USAF. While this technology has so far been only for military applications. The commercial viability of this design is bring researched by every major aerospace company as it provides serious advantages to the companies as in 27% reduction in fuel burn and a 15% decrease in the takeoff weight for similar size modern commercial airplane.
You may wonder on why this hasn’t been implemented earlier when the idea behind has been researched since the 1960’s. The biggest problem facing this plane is the stability factor because the center point of weight and lift is never aligned which causes the nose of the plane to pitch down this is counteracted by the tail of the plane. This is causes significant difficulties in controlling the plane which can’t be done manually.
But with the advent of fly-by wire technology the minor corrections that have to be performed is handled by the computer. Now with multiple redundancy these planes can be made as safe as possible. This enables company to save a lot of money and increase in the number of people travelling per plane. All of this would lead to better savings for the end traveler. Also with the huge volume available for fuel renewable energy like hydrogen could also be a possibility in the future.
Now where can this technology be used in, it can be used in commercial airlines to transport a large number of people with a lower fuel burn rate per rate, it can enable higher volumes of cargo to be transported per flight. Thereby, reducing the cost of cargo transport.