The Flying Wing with Hydrogen. Design, Challenges and Stakes

For a century, civil aircraft have adopted a common architecture, optimized for a certain context. This "classic" design is perfectly suited to the three missions assigned to an aircraft: creating lift (flying!), carrying a payload (transporting) and controlling flight dynamics (piloting). This is how each of our aircraft carries out these three missions in a Cartesian manner, with their wings, fuselage and tailplanes respectively.

The advantage of this architecture is that it specializes the various components, offering both the possibility of segmented certification and industrial organization in clearly assigned "work packages". For example, one partner makes the wing, another the horizontal stabilizer, a third the vertical stabilizer, and other manufacturers share the fuselage and final assembly.

The aim of this article is to summarize the current prospects offered by a profoundly different architecture: the "all-in-one" flying wing in the new context of sustainable development and air transport. This formula offers clear advantages in terms of performance and mechanical and systems integration, but also conceals a number of technical and regulatory challenges which we will explore.

The flying wing will thus require a number of evolutions in terms of control, volume management and internal and airport facilities. It will also require integrated design "from the first stroke of the pen" and a global vision, with all functions becoming intrinsically interdependent. But these are precisely the challenges that are driving progress, and in particular pave the way for aircraft with a very low carbon footprint.