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Air Force Plans New Blended Wing Body Cargo/Tanker Aircraft by 2027

airandspaceforces.com

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Re: Air Force Plans New Blended Wing Body Cargo/Tanker Aircraft by 2027

#111
post #2

Blended-wing body makes a lot of sense for cargo/tanker aircraft. No issues with emergency evacuation procedure for passengers.

Has it been evaluated whether any real-life evacuations were time sensitive enough to where a wide bodied plane would have resulted in more deaths? Doesn't seem like a real problem intuitively, but I don't really have any data to back that up.

Aircraft fires can escalate extremely quickly, and in an enclosed space like an aircraft there's nowhere for smoke to go. Accidents also often result in less than optimal evacuation conditions. Fire may block exits, doors can jam, slides can fail to deploy, all of which slow down the evacuation. I've spent way too much time watching the Air Disasters show [0] and off the top of my head remember at least half a dozen or so accidents portrayed in the show where a plane was evacuated in minutes but some passengers were killed by fire or smoke because they couldn't get off in time. I'm not saying that wide body planes couldn't be evacuated quickly or safely (haven't really looked into them at all) but I don't think it's a situation where you can just say, wide bodies are more slow to evacuate and that's no big deal.

[0]: https://www.smithsonianchannel.com/shows/air-disasters

Re: Air Force Plans New Blended Wing Body Cargo/Tanker Aircraft by 2027

#112
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the software worked as intended, no one would have noticed.

That's the problem - it's not clear to me that it could have worked as intended. But you can easily get that impression in high level meetings I imagine.

I think it could have, but perhaps without the safety factors needed, because of insufficient redundancy in the AOA sensors.

Re: Air Force Plans New Blended Wing Body Cargo/Tanker Aircraft by 2027

#113
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P8 went pretty well. Blended wing isn’t sci-fi, B2 and plenty of ucav are full flying wing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_P-8_Poseidon

Boeing was a very very different company then. I’m bullish on blended wing body, but I would have much more confidence if it were Lockheed or someone emulating the SpaceX, rapid development cycles working on this.

P8 to KC46 introductions was 6 years. I think it’s more likely different parts of a large corp get run differently. MQ25 and 28 seem to be proceeding fine.

Re: Air Force Plans New Blended Wing Body Cargo/Tanker Aircraft by 2027

#114

The KC-46 program has not gone swimmingly. I'm curious how they think they're going to get a demonstrator flying in 5 years when they can't get a tanker that's based on an existing production airframe flying on schedule. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_KC-46_Pegasus

With the ACCA being designed in 5 months and flown in 20 months from the go-ahead, I would say 5 years is definitely possible. I wouldn't be surprised if its got a heavy use of composites as well, in order to reduce he number of total parts. For the ACCA, they had 300 structural parts vs 3,000 metallic and 4,000 mechanical fasteners vs 40,000 otherwise. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/history/a...

To be fair, there’s a pretty massive difference in scope between a 50 mil Afrl tech demonstration program and what this would be. If/when this materializes, it’s likely to be a capital A Airforce program worth at least a billion dollars with a goal to produce at least one demonstrator that can be directly followed by LRIP and then IOC probably only a couple years after the demonstrator first flies.

For that level of effort, five years probably isn’t impossible, but it’s definitely unlikely.

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