There are certain things we have always with us; the Bible mentions the poor, but believers in the ultimate superiority of flying wings are another, and almost equally persistent, category. Like devout knights bent upon finding the chalice used by Jesus at the Last Supper, they keep their eyes unblinking on the prize. Their Grail is a pure airplane consisting of a wing alone, uncluttered by any sinful excrescence: an immaculate temple of Lift.
Flying wings-a goofy name, really; "tailless aircraft" is better-are not merely an obsession of cranks, however. They appear periodically among the meditations of even such organizations as Boeing, which, in spite of a brief delusional period characterized by persistent repetition of the phrase "sonic cruiser," is on the whole crank-free. Giant transport planes consisting of nothing but wing are proposed; they are called "blended wings" or "spanloaders." The latter name hints at one of the characteristics that make them desirable. The idea is to lighten and simplify the airplane by putting the weight where the lift is, in the wing, rather than concentrating it in a slender tube at the middle.
This is a wonderfully simple idea, and like most simple ideas it is suspect. The fuselages of high-altitude airplanes are round not just to make them roll downhill better, but also because round is the natural shape of an inflated object. (When metal fatigue started showing up in the skins of old 747s, it was in the flat sides of the two-story portions that it appeared.) Pressurizing a wing is such a difficult structural problem that it would send designers scurrying after circular airfoils.
Other great names in aviation have had their flings with flying wings. We currently have, obviously, the Northrop Grumman B-2 bomber, thought by some to make up for the unjust fate of the magnificent YB-49 and other Jack Northrop flying wings of yore. Until recently we had the extraordinary 250-foot Helios, a featherweight sun-driven plank, propelled by 14 electric motors, that had climbed to nearly 100,000 feet. Sixty years ago the Germans had the Lippisch-designed Messerschmitt Me-162 Komet, the rocket-powered interceptor that was praised for its wonderfully docile flying qualities by those of its pilots who were not incinerated in fueling accidents. In the Fifties our Navy, briefly impressed with the possibilities of taillessness, was operating Vought F7U Cutlasses from carriers, and after them the ageless Douglas F4D Skyray-but that was a delta wing, and a slightly different story.
It is reasonable to wonder why, if airplanes can fly without tails, so many have them nevertheless; or, to put the question another way, if airplanes have tails in order to provide them with longitudinal stability, how can any airplane do without one? And why do we find long, high-aspect-ratio flying wings, like the YB-49, surprising-looking, while we take equally tailless narrow deltas, like Concorde, for granted?
I was traumatized at an early age by the unruly behavior of balsa wings when launched without fuselage and empennage. They are mere whirligigs, tumbling leading-edge-over-trailing all the way to the ground.
