A futuristic, tailless aircraft design that can be used for military tankers and transport planes will be tested at the end of this year at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center.
X-48b, along with NASA, the Air Force and Boeing research project, testing the design concept called "blended wing body" that researchers believe provides more lift, offering greater range and as much as 30 percent of fuel is greater.
"We believe the BWB concept has the potential to cost-effectively fill many roles required by the Air Force, such as tanking, weapons carriage, and command and control," said Capt. Scott Bjorge, the Air Force Research Laboratory's X-48b program manager.
"This study is a cooperative effort, and a major step in the development of BWB."
Unlike the traditional "tube and wing" design in which wings are attached to the aircraft, which blended wing body combined with the wing - producing something like a cross between conventional and aircraft wings such as B-2 stealth bomber.
This program will test two remotely controlled X-48b-planes, each with three jet engines and wingspan of 21 meters. That is about one-twelve operational measures mixed-wing body aircraft.
"The X-48b-scale prototypes have been dynamically to represent the larger aircraft and are used to indicate that the BWB is as controllable and safe during takeoff, approach and landing as a conventional military transport airplane," said Norm Princen, Boeing Phantom Works chief engineer for the X-48b program.
X-48b aircraft to be flown at Dryden were gathered for the Boeing Phantom Works by Cranfield Aerospace division in the United Kingdom. Other aircraft have been assembled and wrapped the wind tunnel testing at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia.
Aircraft wind tunnel will be sent to Dryden, where he will serve as a backup aircraft for the flight test program. X-48b team imagine doing about 25 flights for about a year. The aircraft will be flown no higher than 10,000 feet and no more than about 135 mph during testing.
"At first, we'll find the basic envelope expansion - pushing out the boundaries of what the aircraft is designed to do," Princen said.
The team will move gradually into the hearts of their efforts to the test - to evaluate the design of low-speed flight-control characteristics.
"We want to find out if there is bad characteristics out there," Princen said.
The aircraft will be flown by a pilot at a ground station equipped in such a way as to provide a feeling of actually being on the plane. Instead of a computer joystick, it will have a stick and rudder pedals from an actual aircraft and video from the aircraft will be forwarded to the station to give the pilot an out-the-cockpit-window display.
Chief pilot for the flight test effort Norm Howell, C-17 transport test pilot who is a resident of Rosamond.
Boeing has been doing research on the blended wing design concept since the early 1990s. In the late 1990s, Stanford University's Flight Research Laboratory and what was then McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing, conducted flight tests of the broad 17-foot wing, remotely piloted blended-wing body craft at El Mirage dry lake. www.dailynews.com
X-48b, along with NASA, the Air Force and Boeing research project, testing the design concept called "blended wing body" that researchers believe provides more lift, offering greater range and as much as 30 percent of fuel is greater.
"We believe the BWB concept has the potential to cost-effectively fill many roles required by the Air Force, such as tanking, weapons carriage, and command and control," said Capt. Scott Bjorge, the Air Force Research Laboratory's X-48b program manager.
"This study is a cooperative effort, and a major step in the development of BWB."
Unlike the traditional "tube and wing" design in which wings are attached to the aircraft, which blended wing body combined with the wing - producing something like a cross between conventional and aircraft wings such as B-2 stealth bomber.
This program will test two remotely controlled X-48b-planes, each with three jet engines and wingspan of 21 meters. That is about one-twelve operational measures mixed-wing body aircraft.
"The X-48b-scale prototypes have been dynamically to represent the larger aircraft and are used to indicate that the BWB is as controllable and safe during takeoff, approach and landing as a conventional military transport airplane," said Norm Princen, Boeing Phantom Works chief engineer for the X-48b program.
X-48b aircraft to be flown at Dryden were gathered for the Boeing Phantom Works by Cranfield Aerospace division in the United Kingdom. Other aircraft have been assembled and wrapped the wind tunnel testing at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia.
Aircraft wind tunnel will be sent to Dryden, where he will serve as a backup aircraft for the flight test program. X-48b team imagine doing about 25 flights for about a year. The aircraft will be flown no higher than 10,000 feet and no more than about 135 mph during testing.
"At first, we'll find the basic envelope expansion - pushing out the boundaries of what the aircraft is designed to do," Princen said.
The team will move gradually into the hearts of their efforts to the test - to evaluate the design of low-speed flight-control characteristics.
"We want to find out if there is bad characteristics out there," Princen said.
The aircraft will be flown by a pilot at a ground station equipped in such a way as to provide a feeling of actually being on the plane. Instead of a computer joystick, it will have a stick and rudder pedals from an actual aircraft and video from the aircraft will be forwarded to the station to give the pilot an out-the-cockpit-window display.
Chief pilot for the flight test effort Norm Howell, C-17 transport test pilot who is a resident of Rosamond.
Boeing has been doing research on the blended wing design concept since the early 1990s. In the late 1990s, Stanford University's Flight Research Laboratory and what was then McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing, conducted flight tests of the broad 17-foot wing, remotely piloted blended-wing body craft at El Mirage dry lake. www.dailynews.com
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