New Flying-V prototype plane took maiden flight and may be 20% more fuel efficient

[Xist]

The prototype is the size of a large drone, but it is crazy to see the pictures from an angle: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/f...grm/index.html

[redpoint5]

I'd expect Dutch Roll to be a software solvable solution. The whole reason why plane shapes haven't evolved much over the years is that inherent stability was assumed. It's going to take software to break that paradigm.

[freebeard]

Dutch roll
Dutch roll is a type of aircraft motion consisting of an out-of-phase combination of "tail-wagging" and rocking from side to side. This yaw-roll coupling is one of the basic flight dynamic modes.Wikipedia

They make the claim but don't show the landing. I don't trust CNN, they'd try to relabel a blended wing as a Flying-V[tm]. And passenger seating in the wing has been done: Junkers G.38

The part I would question is making a pressurizable cabin in that shape.

[Piotrsko]

Which is why airliners are generally tubes, easy peasy engineering. The B2 has pressurized irregular sections, as does the F117.

No wonder the thing Dutch rolls, diehederal on a flying wing with tip rudders is the cause. The parts fight each other. Look at the concorde, XB49, N9M, B2: no tip rudders. The B2 wobbles because the surfaces don't move as fast as they needed. Physics,, baby.

[redpoint5]

I'd start by making freight only aircraft with non-pressurized cargo compartments, and solve the passenger problem later.

Is increasing O2 concentration a viable alternative to pressurization, or perhaps just to reduce the pressure requirement?

[Piotrsko]

Yes adding concentration gets around the pressure issue at the expense of making everything a blowtorch if accidentally ignited. My non pressurized plane could have a aux O2 pressure system, but the pricing and required training was prohibitive and it didn't work on the 2 year old in the back seat. Ditto for typical.passengers: do you know the symptoms of impending hypoxia?

[freebeard]

Apollo 1, 27 January 1967.

[redpoint5]

Yeah, but increased O2 concentration at lower pressure presents less fire hazard. Not sure exactly how that works out. Maybe at 40k ft, you'd need 100% O2. Not even sure if that is a viable solution.

Too complex though because adjusting the O2 concentration down as the plane descends is probably a bigger issue than simply pressurizing the cabin.

Still, air freight is going to become more and more important in an increasingly industrialized and global economy. Seems the low hanging fruit of improving efficiency would be a flying wing with a non-pressurized cargo hold.

...seems like most engineering problems would be solvable if carbon nanotubes were easy to implement.

[freebeard]

Seems the low hanging fruit of improving efficiency would be a flying wing with a non-pressurized cargo hold.

Airship shaped warehouse with drones for the last mile.

Flash graphene is easy, mesoscale additive manufacturing is harder.

[Piotrsko]

There isn't a need for high tech engineering, it would be a nice to do but unnecessary.
Flying wings are efficient but they have their own deficiencies that can at times be much more fatal because they occur close to the ground or even in one case above 40,000 ft.