After 50 years of flying wing and tail-less design, the 1980's saw a slowdown in new designs, and a lot of existing machines extended with the new economics and politics. The first design to break out of this pattern in the mid 80's was the Boeing 797 Wingliner, the first basic Blended Wing Body airliner or BWB. This design enabled economic design of smaller seat-count transoceanic passenger carry, allowing smaller airlines to go International. The 97' was notable in that it was one of the last flying wings designed by analog drafting methods and produced primarily in metals. From this point onward, CG and composites would take ever large shares of aerospace.
Card model, shown with a 1/200 diecast Savoia S66X airliner (ModelPower)
A surprise came in the form of the reappearance of the swept wing versus the triangle. A specialized design for high altitude operation, inspired by the U-2, Stratosfera and the long wing Canberras, a high flying wing. The Lockheed U-8 was a composite wing structure using high bypass turbofans optimized for the upper stratosphere. This card model is shown in NASA low-heating white and markings, with a weather research mission stripe. The U-8 would become a test bed for many new aerospace ideas, instruments and projects. A 2009 rebuilt U-8 had semitransparent wings that were solar collectors to run the main fans in conjunction with fuel cells using bio-fuels.
Some designs like the B2 arose in this period of the 90's built around the Stealth mission, but clearly the cold war was done and so was the need for large numbers of strategic platforms, but the need for Air transport, Command and control planes and tankers will always be there and Boeing in the early 2000's decided to combine all 3 in one airframe, a new concept BWB.
Plastic model, 1/288 scale using 737 wings (144th) and styrene sheet stock with 1/200 scale 747 engines. Shown with a 1/288 B-35 for scale.
And with these, my presentation of an alternate aerospace history based on flying wing, tail-less or blended body designs comes to an end.
