Chinese blended wing body technology demonstrator flies for first time

Found this surprising news item at the Aviation Week website:
China Flies Subscale Blended Wing Body Airliner Concept

China is quite a newcomer to experimenting with the concept of blended wing body transport because the Chinese aerospace community until recently has had little experience with designing a blended wing body airport. Although few technical details of the BWB-300 subscale technology demonstrator are publicly known, the twin jet engines of this aircraft remind me of those of the X-48C and the vertical stabilizers are similar to those of design studies for BWB conceived in Europe as part of the VELA and NACRE projects.

Link:
www.researchgate.net...

a reply to: Potlatch

Boeing must have had a Chinese spy as that bird looks like a copy and very familiar !

a reply to: 727Sky

Must have, China isn’t known for innovation, but rather replication.

I’d be seriously surprised if even with stealing plans they can make a next gen jet with a completely new form factor that is worth a damn though.

It’s not just following a blueprint with these birds, you have to be able to acquire the right materials and tech to run them.

a reply to: CriticalStinker

And, to make it a smashing success, you gotta be able to manufacture the aircaft and the parts with reasonable efficiency, both cost and time.
Lots of stuff to think about when pioneering a funky shaped aircraft. Not saying it can't be done--progress has to happen somehow... but it's pretty dang involved.

originally posted by: 727Sky
a reply to: Potlatch

Boeing must have had a Chinese spy as that bird looks like a copy and very familiar !

I was thinking along the lines that someone, perhaps from Boeing or another company, sold out to China.

Regards,

Bally

Grab a 3 view sketch online,convert it to a 3D loft,cut and shut in a program like Catia5 and run your simulations in flow works or other Solidworks addon.Its not as though China cant build aircraft.Plus a lot of their engineers were trained in allied universities.

originally posted by: CriticalStinker
a reply to: 727Sky

Must have, China isn’t known for innovation, but rather replication.

I’d be seriously surprised if even with stealing plans they can make a next gen jet with a completely new form factor that is worth a damn though.

It’s not just following a blueprint with these birds, you have to be able to acquire the right materials and tech to run them.

Why would you think that a significantly huge number of human beings are incapable of creative and innovative thought?

LOL.

Is this like the sour grapes comments that Americans made about 5G telephony?



Think about it. The Russians and the Chinese have deployed hypersonic missiles and the US doesn't have any. The Chinese and the Europeans had 5G telephony for sale and the US didn't. The US stole the atomic bomb program from the Brits. The US stole the jet engine from the Brits. The US stole radio communications from the Italians and RADAR from the Brits. The Internet is a British invention first implemented fully in Europe (at CERN).

Perhaps there isn't any nation that is a world leader in innovation?

And perhaps the US, being so heavily invested into getting a financial return on investment, has issues with funding research that does not turn out technologies quickly enough?

So apparently aerospace design works completely differently in other countries, and all their designs that look anything like something in the US is obviously copied from something that we did.

a reply to: chr0naut

I didn’t say they were incapable of innovation, I said they’re not known for it.

They’ve used spies to steal other countries military plans in the past, so I’m not off base in saying it could be a possibility in this scenario.

A tailless jet is a huge change in design from what mankind is used to. The speeds and demands for these aircraft’s are huge, and it is quite the coincidence it coincides with the release of our next gen tailless.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
So apparently aerospace design works completely differently in other countries, and all their designs that look anything like something in the US is obviously copied from something that we did.

well, duh.

they can't just use American laws of physics, that would be illegal.

a reply to: CriticalStinker

A tailless fighter and a tailless transport are as far apart in terms of aerodynamics as an F-16 and C-5. This has nothing to do with NGAD concepts being revealed.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Fair enough, you’re more well versed in this realm than me by a long shot.

I'll admit the odd part to me is they went from virtually no advanced programs in the 90’s to suddenly being on the cutting edge. I remember in 2013 they had stolen quite a bit of military intel from the US including the Aegis platform.

a reply to: CriticalStinker

The Blended Wing Body is a commercial program, as far as current development goes. Boeing built a subscale mock up, known as the X-48B (the A was cancelled before it ever flew) and tried different configurations. First flight was in 2007, and the first phase flew until 2010. They installed a new flight control computer and began phase 2 of flight testing, to include controllability testing in September 2010. The X-48C flew in 2012, until 2013.

The blended wing is a very old design, dating back to the mid 1920s. The design was shelved after it proved extremely difficult, until the 1940s. Those designs didn't live up to expectations either, so it was shelved again until the 1990s when NASA built a 17 foot model called BWB-17. They flew it as an RC plane, and it showed good handling characteristics. Airbus is also working on MAVERIC as a potential A320neo family replacement.

originally posted by: CriticalStinker
a reply to: 727Sky

Must have, China isn’t known for innovation, but rather replication.

I’d be seriously surprised if even with stealing plans they can make a next gen jet with a completely new form factor that is worth a damn though.

It’s not just following a blueprint with these birds, you have to be able to acquire the right materials and tech to run them.

I used to believe exactly that at one time probably because some forgotten author had put the idea into my mind.

But on closer inspection you will find they can and have in the past been extremely innovative and just maybe are becoming so again though today most of there innovation is based in stolen ideas and copy cat mentality.

In the past however it is said they had water powered bellow's blast furnaces to create truly very good steel as early as the 800's and earlier but that it was somehow lost, there are claims they had mechanically complex devices also before the first western clock makers but once again for some reason forgot it.

There are possibly reasons, there pre-communist adherence to Confucius are possibly one such reason though to be fair there is much indeed to be admired and that we in the west could learn from SOME of Confucius ideas, protecting and staying loyal to family, friends and nation for example though the Cultural revolution tried to destroy his legacy.

But in it's most extreme it was abused in ways that perhaps Old Confucius himself had never intended, a hundred years before Columbus set off to discover Hispaniola and pave the way for the discovery and conquest of the America's a Chinese Eunuch and Admiral by the name of Cheng Ho now revered by man in China but once stricken from history was charged with expanding China and given a grand fleet consisting of truly gigantic junk's to do so, these Junk's made use of transverse bulkheads just like the Titanic but in China's case the idea probably came from the study of how a cane is split into individual cells and how that can help it float even when part is flooded.

It is rumoured that he set sail and even reached parts of what is today the US, maybe even discovered part of Australia BUT when he returned the old Emperor that had set him on this task had died and a young NEW emperor more concerned with a CONFUSION of Confucians ideals ordered the grand fleet burned to the water line and all it's records locked away or destroyed, this new emperor turned his nation inward and closed it's borders to outsiders in a form of protectionism that was only broken by the eventual and shameful opium wars were a unified fleet of western nations ships invaded China and forced them into a humiliating treatise to allow there people to be sold Opium, basically back then drug dealers were just as powerful as today though today we call them big pharma of course and as today they held enough sway over there governments to get them to use there fleets to do there dirty work, something for us to be ashamed of and something that eventually so destabilised China along with the century's later invasion by Japan that both military and communist forces eventually destroyed there stable system of government that had lasted for eon's.

They have made many inventions over the ages and forgotten them all, they are simply human like we are and not some alien species though how they treat often little girls does give me pause and running over a baby girl like she is nothing makes me lose hope in there humanity but there are still good people among them despite the poison and inhumanity of the Maoist years and the communist system under which they live, albeit these days a much more watered down and capitalist version of that than evil old Mao had ever intended them to have and one in which there government now more closely mirrors the imperial system of the past with there party chairman now being the affective emperor.

Still have a look at there founding emperors tomb, Mass produced crossbows with standardized design, in the west at the same time a personal crossbow was unheard of though the Romans had a huge version that acted like a type of artillery, while not as good as a truly skilled archer this allowed them a force multiplier unique for it's period.

So in fact I would argue they have been extremely inventive but no more than other cultures, they forgot or abandoned too many of there past invention's though and much of this was through misgovernance and following strict philosophy over common sense at times.

If we look outside of China to other nations to prove this point the ancient Carthaginians had a kind of mass production of there ships that was pretty much the same as the Chines (who had paper money and the printing press before us remember) had, the ancient Mesopotamians had chemical gas grenades.

Heron of Alexandria invented all the parts of a steam engine but it was never put together as such though he did create a kind of vending machine.

Basically we are all human, while I am appalled at China's often inhumanity, cruelty to other nations and peoples and even to there own little girls I recognize that this failing in humanity has in the past also affected just about every other nation and people in the world and yet for all there failings for the bulk of there history they were more civilized and more humane than most other society's.

The only one that shines out in history as more humane was probably the ancient Hebrews.

China was polluted by Confucianism though, I don't think it was the man's intent as many of his ideas were sound and good but it led to them being cruel to girls and regarded boy's as the only ones that could pass on there family when in fact genetically speaking the exact opposite is the truth as males can only reliably pass on their Y Chromosome while females pass on there cell's, there cytoplasts such as mitochondria and through the female line their X Chromosome meaning that while half there nuclear genes come from the father though nuclear genes from both parent's are eventually lost over the generations but the cells of the mother continue, the mitochondrial genes are also passed down unbroken and that means we are all made of our mothers cells and those cells she inherited from the very first woman but of the male line only the Y chromosome remains from the first man.

In effect Confucius had it all wrong, his plan for the family though was very good and made his nation a model of stability but this stability also led it to stagnate and put tradition over innovation in importance.

They can create, can invent and have done so repeatedly over the century's though they were so far behind due to this stagnation that the west leapfrogged them and they had to play catch up, in there shoes I am not certain we would not have done the same?.

And in fact if you believe some of the alien reverse engineering theory's maybe we actually are doing just that with someone more advanced than we are?.

Either way human beings, good bad and somewhere in between just the same as we are though I do have annoyance with them on several matters, racism, low regard for human life especially that of woman and an over belief in fate that like Confucianism from which they probably draw this crippled there individuality, there innovativeness and harms them in other way's, they should learn they can always wrestle fate.

a reply to: LABTECH767

That was a really well thought out and informative post. I really appreciate you putting it together and sharing it. Probably going to take me a while to really process it.

People have been stealing other ideas for years..Anthony Fokker took the idea of the Dr1 Triplane off a crashed Sopwith Triplane.
France and Uk stole the interrupter gear off the Germans.
Supermarines Spitfire wing was supposedly influenced by the Heinkel 51.
Its smart business to copy others as all the hard works done.As I said any half decent 3D designer can get an aircraft design started.

a reply to: chr0naut

Technically thats wrong. a ICBM warhead is hypersonic when it comes vack down. We can also use those to fire off kinetic kill weapons as well if so desired.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: CriticalStinker

The Blended Wing Body is a commercial program, as far as current development goes. Boeing built a subscale mock up, known as the X-48B (the A was cancelled before it ever flew) and tried different configurations. First flight was in 2007, and the first phase flew until 2010. They installed a new flight control computer and began phase 2 of flight testing, to include controllability testing in September 2010. The X-48C flew in 2012, until 2013.

The blended wing is a very old design, dating back to the mid 1920s. The design was shelved after it proved extremely difficult, until the 1940s. Those designs didn't live up to expectations either, so it was shelved again until the 1990s when NASA built a 17 foot model called BWB-17. They flew it as an RC plane, and it showed good handling characteristics. Airbus is also working on MAVERIC as a potential A320neo family replacement.

Boeing's Blended Wing Body concepts haven't always been geared towards commercial use, there have been design studies for a BWB by Boeing involving a tanker transport or strategic airlifter. Although passengers were lukewarm about the notion of a passenger BWB when they got the chance to sit in a partial cabin mockup of Boeing's 450 passenger BWB design (itself a slightly scaled down version of the 289 foot span BWB airliner designed by McDonnell Douglas) in the early 2000s, the commercial freight applications of the BWB concept were not lost on Boeing. Although Boeing is pitching its BWB design to the USAF's requirement for a new-generation tanker transport to replace the KC-10, it will be more than happy to submit the commercial freight BWB design for a requirement by UPS and FedEx for a purpose-built cargo aircraft to carry more freight than the 747 cargo variants.

Link:
www.key.aero...
www.airandspaceforces.com...