Airbus brought a surprise to the recent Singapore Air Show—a concept for a ‘blended wing’ airliner that would potentially reduce carbon emissions by 20% because the design’s aerodynamics produce much less drag than conventional designs.
It’s not a totally new idea; the blending of wing and fuselage was used in the B-2 U.S. Air Force bomber, and in a number of NASA test vehicles, but no one has previously done serious work on the idea for a large airliner. Only one blended wing plane has ever gone into production, the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.
And Airbus has gone beyond the drawing board; for the past it’s been flying a 10-foot technology demonstrator, code-named Maveric, at a site in central France to gain data and to prepare for design of a full-scale test plane. The whole project has been secret up to now.
While the idea of a fuselage whose lines blend into the wings has pluses in terms of efficiency, there are issues of difficulty of control. Also, because the wings cover the window spaces, passengers would have to adjust to a windowless cabin, unlikely to be a popular idea.
