Blended Wing Aircraft (working draft)

Flying pencils with wings dominate commercial airlines today, but they suffer from turbulent airflow drag issues that can be nearly entirely solved with blended wing designs that NASA gave freely to Boeing & Airbus, so you might wonder why there are no blended wing commercial airline aircraft today in 2023. 

Electronic redundant fast control of the aircraft control surfaces makes it more complicated to stabilize a flying wing, or blended body aircraft. This means expensive triple redundant fly by wire computers making 600 adjustments per seconds to active aero surfaces attenuated by electro-hydraulics. That makes the flight control system cost so much that only NASA can actually afford to make one that works :P 

Technological Lock-in means the tube with wings deigns are well proven & that gives market inertia that even a superior design with 2X better fuel economy cannot diffuse well until a first mover bites the bullet with DEV costs & goes ahead with manufacturing a commercial version of the NASA designs.

Boeing 787 already provides 2X improvement in fuel economy vs conventional aircraft it outcompetes with better total operating costs or total cost of ownership lifetime. While the 787 costs more upfront, it use 30-40% less fuel that competitors, giving operating cost savings in lower fuel consumption that more than makes up for the increased upfront capital costs. 787 also requires less Maintenace since the CRFP less prone to cracking than aluminum.

While aluminum alloys are largely ISO in terms of mechanical strength with uniform strength across dimensions, composites like wrapped carbon-fiber can be tuned with specific directional strength in application specific ways that achieve even better performance per unit mass, making CRFP intensive aircraft 60% lighter in terms of the airframe than equivalent aluminum intensive aircraft. 

BMW made the i3 and i8 out of CRFP, resulting in mass savings of many hundreds of pounds compared with aluminum alone. Cost innovations by utilizing BASF hot stamp fast setting thermoplastic prepreg CRFP enables body panel section production within 10 seconds per hot press machine, then the panels are epoxy glued by glue polymer application robots, clamped together by robots into a hot set curing rig where 1500w halogen heat soak lamps heat cure body the hot set epoxy so the panels form a giant super structure, the mono-shell CRFP vehicle body of the I3 bolted to an aluminum frame containing the EV powertrain, motor, drivetrain, battery, controller, shafts, suspension & similar parts to make repairs and maintenance less expensive. 

Tesla Model 3 blows the i3 out of the water in every way possible, but came out way later, since the i3 launched more than 8 years ago. Model 3 prices have also declined because of Tesla cost optimizing production to lower manufacturing costs of Model Y & Model 3. I am very excited about the upcoming Tesla Model 2. The Chevy Equinox EV seems like the best value EV at the moment. I am hesitant to buy any vehicle made by GM because of the Hummer program they purchased from AM General then dumbed down to a Suburban SUV with a body kit and gasoline engine. The H1 Hummer was the real deal with its V10 diesel engine and top speed of 55mph.