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.
Air Force Plans New Blended Wing Body Cargo/Tanker Aircraft by 2027
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Re: Air Force Plans New Blended Wing Body Cargo/Tanker Aircraft by 2027
#112Earlier 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.
Re: Air Force Plans New Blended Wing Body Cargo/Tanker Aircraft by 2027
#113Earlier 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.
Re: Air Force Plans New Blended Wing Body Cargo/Tanker Aircraft by 2027
#114The 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...
For that level of effort, five years probably isn’t impossible, but it’s definitely unlikely.