Don't get the airsickness comment, my eyes are usually shut when I'm on an airliner or I'm staring at a TV screen.
As far as CG, yes a flying wing would be more sensitive, but you have a limited longitudinal arm in which to place your payload. You can't carry stuff in front of or behind the wing like you can on a conventional aircraft. MD-11s have fuel tanks in the horizontal stabilizer and are able to overcome that.
Without stabilizers, flying wings have a tendency to "hunt" in pitch and yaw. That is what made them sub-par bombing platforms. Just a few years later, autopilots were developed to the point that this would not have been an issue. The aircraft was just a bit ahead of its time.
The other drawback of a flying wing is that when you pitch the nose up to flare, the elevons are are reducing the camber of the airfoil which reduces the coefficient of lift just when you want it most. You therefore need more wing area to compensate, but since the entire aircraft is a wing and well streamlined, that isn't a huge disadvantage.
Kyleb wrote:
junkman9096 wrote:
I'm curious how the projected blended wing airliners concept will pan out. Probably efficient but a lot of air sickness without outside visual clues.
Apologies for moving farther off-topic, but the big challenge for flying wings is pitch stability. One of the reasons conventional airliners have long fuselages is to put the empennage way back there so a little elevator or trim tab movement will have a big impact. With flying wings, that moment arm is much smaller and requires a lot more trim surface or control surface movement to achieve the same amount of pitch trim. This is important both from a CG perspective where you want a wide allowable CG range and from the ability to trim the aircraft to a certain speed.
So, if the BWB aircraft is relatively short nose to tail, it'll suffer the same compromises as flying wings, planks, and the like.
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