11.10.05

Michael Braukus
Headquarters, Washington
(Office: 202/358-1979)

Kathy Barnstorff
Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.
(Office: 757/864-9886/Cellular: 757/344-8511) RELEASE: 05-073

NASA FLYING WING MODEL SOARS IN HISTORIC WIND TUNNEL

Ask anyone what a plane looks like and most will tell you a tube with 
wings. NASA researchers are trying to expand that. They're testing a 
design for a flying wing, called a blended wing body.

Technicians have installed a five-percent scale model of a blended 
wing body in the Langley Full-Scale Tunnel at NASA's Langley Research 
Center in Hampton, Va. During tests in the tunnel's huge 30X60 foot 
test section, pilots "flew" the 12-foot wingspan, 80-pound model. It 
stayed aloft in the tunnel's wind stream constrained only by a tether 
cable. The flying wing is the biggest model ever to be free flight 
tested in the Full-Scale Tunnel.

"We want to understand the edge of the envelope flight characteristics 
of the blended wing body," said Dan Vicroy, blended wing body flight 
dynamics principal investigator. "We're comfortable with the flight 
characteristics of conventional tube with wings airplanes, but we 
don't have much experience with flying wings."

NASA is working with Boeing Phantom Works, Long Beach, Calif., on this 
advanced, more fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly airplane 
concept. Researchers say a blended wing body could be useful as a 
multi-role aircraft for the military, including functioning as a 
tanker, cargo or transport plane.

But much testing needs to be done before the blended wing body could 
be safely introduced as a transport aircraft. For instance the 
blended wing body doesn't have a conventional airplane tail, used to 
control pitch (up and down) and yaw (side to side) motions. Instead 
it uses a combination of control surfaces on the trailing edge of the 
wing to control and maneuver the airplane. The free flight tests will 
help assess the best combination of control surfaces and control 
limits.

Other questions also need to be answered about the blended wing body 
configuration. "One is – how do you build a lightweight structure 
that can be pressurized," said Vicroy. "It's easy to pressurize a 
tube, but not as easy to pressurize a non-cylindrical shape."

Even building the blended wing body model was a challenge. For this 
test the model had to be dynamically scaled, which means it had to 
have the same scaled shape as the real plane as well as the scaled 
weight and inertia characteristics of roll, pitch and yaw. This 
required the model to be very lightweight for its size. It was built 
out of graphite composite material similar to that used to build 
Formula 1 racecars.

Owned by NASA Langley and operated by Old Dominion University in 
Norfolk, Va. The Langley Full-Scale Tunnel was completed in 1931. It 
has been used to test everything from World War II fighters, to 
submarines, to the Mercury capsule to concepts for a supersonic 
transport and now a flying wing.

The research is part of the Fundamental Aeronautics Program in NASA's 
Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. The program's goal is to 
advance breakthrough aerospace technologies.

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html

	
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