"bumper" wrote in message
...

"Bill Daniels" bildan@comcast-dot-net wrote in message
. ..

Of course, an existing Genesis won't fly without the tail. But the
Genesis CONCEPT could have as evidenced by Jim Marske's designs.

Bill Daniels


Would the resulting aircraft perform better than the much more numerous
and seemingly more successful "standard" planform?

While I admire experimenting and innovation, I wonder why, if the flying
wing concept were so good, at least as applied to gliders, hasn't it been
embraced by major manufacturers? They seem willing to go to great lengths
to eek out as much performance as they can. Could it be that the tweaks
needed to impart longitudinal stability, like reflexed trailing edges, are
not efficient enough over a broad enough speed range?

bumper
Minden, NV

The answer to your questions is that we really don't know. There are good
people on both sides of the arguement.

The thing with all flying wings both the swept variety and the straight or
slightly swept forward is that there isn't the long history of incremental
development. Designers have found it expedient to just keep tweaking the
conventional tailboom design to get another small increment of performance.
This has led to a huge body of knowledge about that approach. The body of
knowledge about flying wings is far smaller thus the development risks are
much higher.

There are two things that might change that. First, there just doesn't seem
to be much more performance to extract out of the conventional approach so
designers may start taking risks with more radical approaches. Second, the
state of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has reached the point where it
can reduce the risks of a radical design.

Another problem with the history of flying wing designs is that the typical
pilot doesn't understand the subtile details of what makes a flying wing
work well. If a particular flying wing design doesn't turn out to be a
world beater due to some small fixable detail. The general response will be
to condem the whole flying wing idea. This has discouraged a lot of
designers from even trying.

Still, the lure is there. In any reasonable comparison, the flying wing
will have lower parasitic drag and the overall structure will be more
robust. That inherent robustness is like money in the bank to a designer.
He can spend it on things like smoother skins, higher Va speeds or lighter
wings panels.

The advantage to most of us, should the designer begin to try flying wings,
is that it would be an exciting thing to see after all these years of
look-alike pod and boom designs.

Bill Daniels