Blended Wing Airliner Concept Safety Versus Tube & Wing Airliners Considered

Blended Wing Airliner Concept Safety Versus Tube & Wing Airliners Considered

When airliners crash often many people die, and depending on the angle of impact sometimes there are no survivors, some aerospace engineers believe the real problem is in the way aircraft are designed, that is to say fuel inside the belly or fuselage. The long tubular design is also problematic, as it tends to break apart allowing any fire to fill the fuselage, where the people are with smoke and fuel that is on fire.

At least one group has claimed that the Burnelli Wing Design is a better because it has the fuel in the wings and the engines in the fuselage, meaning the main point for ignition of a fire, the engines are separated from the fuel. Conventional airliners, have the fuel in the wings and fuselage, and the engines on the wing, thus a fire is inevitable once the wings come apart on impact during a crash.

Indeed, I have a few comments about this, in that it appears to me that this whole broken fuselage thing might be over played. Remember the Hudson River landing, the aircraft stayed intact. Now, there is a famous NASA Crash test of an airliner coming apart and instantly cooking all the "Dummy Passenger Manikins" inside; still, in the NASA crash they purposely dipped a wing, as it hit the ground, which made for a spectacular explosion, and when aircraft tumbled; well what can you expect?

Does this mean that we should switch to the flying wing design? Could be but, realize the other issue; people wish to fly in an aircraft that looks like an airplane, and people have come to assume airplanes are suppose to look a certain way. Public perception is finicky that way.

One issue with the Bernoulli Blended Wing airliner concept is that it might not be so good for passengers, as they have no ability to see out. Still, this problem could be solved as the top of the cabin could and sides could become a flat panel display and merely display a video what's outside on the walls and ceiling, even better than the view of today's airliners.

Now then, there was an aircraft recently that feel short of the runway in Europe that broke apart, and that was unfortunate, there were deaths. And you can build a better structure or design than a long skinny tube of tooth paste, with wings on it, but there are also trade offs for other things. In that crash a Bernoulli Design may not have crashed in the first place and it probably would have broken apart either.

Still, in the end all aerospace engineers must agree that each aircraft design is a giant compromise of physics and until we build shape shifting wings, we are going to have to keep trading off. Please consider all this.