Ye Olde Rocket Forum - View Single Post - New Shepard flew today! (links)

Quote:

Originally Posted by BEC

I hope so.

Another big driver in the configuration of commercial airplanes (and which is an obstacle to flying wing/blended wing-body configurations) is the requirement to be able to get everyone out of the airplane in 90 seconds with half of the doors inoperative and with while keeping them far enough from engines that might still be operating as well as far enough from each other to fairly evenly split up the escaping traffic. That drives where the doors are and how big they are among other things. And of course those doors are openings in the pressure vessel which must not be allowed to open in flight (usually done by making them "plug" doors).

But distributed propulsion and new materials should open up the "design space" some. It will be fun to watch.

*Nods* I'm a member of T.W.I.T.T. (The Wing Is The Thing, a tailless and flying wing aircraft history, experimentation, and advocacy group, see: http://www.twitt.org/ [flying wing model plans are on their website, too...]), and they've covered the BWB (Blended Wing-Body) research. It has numerous applications (drones, planetary exploration "aerobots," etc.), and the passenger evacuation problem has also been covered in their articles (it's not a show-stopper, but it does make BWB design more complicated and involved, for sure). Also:

Perhaps the closest things to BWB airliners that have flown were Vincent Burnelli's various "quasi-flying wing" aircraft, which (unintentionally) demonstrated almost miraculous crash survivability, because the "wing/fuselage" center section was structurally a box girder. Business jet- and regional jet-size BWB planes might meet the passenger evacuation requirements. Distributed propulsion electric ducted fan airliners with "thrusting/lift-augmenting 'slot' nozzles" (I've seen a NASA CGI video of a proposed BWB cargo plane of this type) look like the Horten brothers' elegant swept flying wings.