TAILLESS CRAFT TO BE TESTED AT EDWARDS.

Byline: JIM SKEEN Staff Writer

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE -- A futuristic, tailless aircraft design that could be used for military tankers and transport aircraft will be flight tested later this year at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center.

The X-48B, a joint NASA, Air Force and Boeing research project, is testing a design concept called the ``blended wing body'' that researchers believe provides more lift, offering greater range and as much as 30 percent greater fuel economy.

``We believe the BWB concept has the potential to cost-effectively fill many roles required by the Air Force, such as tanking, weapons carriage and command and control,'' said Capt. Scott Bjorge, the Air Force Research Laboratory's X-48B program manager. ``This research is a great cooperative effort, and a major step in the development of the BWB.''

Unlike the traditional ``tube and wing'' design in which wings are attached to a fuselage, the blended-wing body merges the fuselage with the wing -- producing something like a cross between a conventional aircraft and a flying wing such as the B-2 stealth bomber.

The program will test two remotely-controlled X-48B aircraft, each with three jet engines and a wingspan of 21 feet. That is about one-twelfth the size of an operational blended-wing body aircraft.

``The X-48B prototypes have been dynamically scaled to represent a much larger aircraft and are being used to demonstrate that a BWB is as controllable and safe during takeoff, approach and landing as a conventional military transport airplane,'' said Norm Princen, Boeing Phantom Works chief engineer for the X-48B program.

The X-48B aircraft that will be flown at Dryden is being assembled for Boeing's Phantom Works division by Cranfield Aerospace in the United Kingdom. The other aircraft has already been assembled and is wrapping up wind tunnel testing at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia.

The wind tunnel aircraft will be shipped to Dryden, where it will serve as a backup aircraft for the flight test program.

The X-48B team envisions conducting about 25 flights over a year. The aircraft will be flown no higher than 10,000 feet and no more than about 135 mph during the tests.

``In the beginning, we'll be looking at basic envelope expansion -- pushing out the boundaries of what the airplane is designed to do,'' Princen said.

The team will move gradually into the heart of their testing effort -- evaluating the design's low-speed flight control characteristics.

``We want to find out if there any bad characteristics out there,'' Princen said.

The aircraft will be flown by a pilot in a ground station equipped in such way to give the feeling of actually being in the aircraft. Instead of a computer joystick, it'll have a stick and rudder pedals from an actual aircraft, and video from the aircraft will be transmitted to the station to provide an out-the-cockpit-window view.

The chief pilot for the flight test effort is Norm Howell, a C-17 transport test pilot who is a resident of Rosamond.

Boeing has conducted research on the blended-wing design concept since the early 1990s. In the late 1990s, Stanford University's Flight Research Laboratory and what was then McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing, conducted test flights of a 17-foot wingspan, remotely piloted blended-body wing craft at El Mirage dry lake.

james.skeen(at)dailynews

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The X-48B Blended Wing Body prototype awaits testing in a wind tunnel at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. Boeing Phantom Works, NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory are testing the blended wing body, a cross between a conventional plane and a flying wing design.

Boeing