Flying Wing

I’ve just moved office at the university, and in line with the latest policies over here, we’re all being moved into big open plan offices where full professors often sit at the next desk to PhD students.

- Guy Gratton

I’ll be honest and say I’m not a huge fan of this approach – but we live with it, and one thing it does do is allow you to see what everybody else is working on. I was interested to see that a Doctoral student a few desks down from mine has her desk piled up with many of the seminal works on tailless aircraft – something that has fascinated me ever since my own PhD. So it gave me an excuse to dust off my knowledge, and remind myself what’s worth sharing?

So what’s the whole issue about tailless aircraft? Well here’s the theory – having a tailplane, or a canard, is inherently draggy and inefficient. If you could persuade a wing, aerodynamically, to maintain in particular pitch stability and controllability on its own – then by deleting the horizontal stabiliser you’ve saved weight, you’ve saved trim drag, you’ve saved manufacturing cost – and you’ve got a shorter aeroplane to fit into the hangar. Can this really be made to work? Well yes, look at Figure 1 – this is the Northrop YB-49, an experimental heavy bomber from the late 1940s (if it looks like something from a science fiction movie, you’re right – it features in the 1953 film The War of the Worlds, unsuccessfully trying to drop nuclear weapons on a Martial invasion). This aeroplane flew for several years in prototype form, and you can see some of the features (or problems) just from this photograph.