Airbus Unveils MAVERIC, a Technical Demonstrator to Test Blended Wing Bodies

c0lo writes:

Ars Technica reports (with nice photos):

On Tuesday at the Singapore air show, Airbus revealed one of its new technology test beds. It's called MAVERIC-short for Model Aircraft for Validation and Experimentation of Robust Innovative Controls, and it eschews the traditional airliner shape for a more unconventional "blended wing body" (BWB) design. This packs a lot more interior volume into an aircraft than one with a traditional long, thin fuselage would for the same overall length and wingspan. In fact, Airbus has been flight testing MAVERIC in secret; the project began in 2017 and first flew in June 2019. However, don't expect to fly on it any time soon-although it's airworthy, it's also only a scale model, measuring 6.6 feet (2m) long and 10.5 feet (3.2m) wide.

[...] Airbus thinks that a BWB design should be about 20 percent more fuel efficient than a conventional single-aisle twin-engined airliner using the same engines. If that number sounds familiar, that's because it's the same fuel savings predicted by another BWB design we explored recently, the Flying V designed by the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands.

Aviation Week has more juicy details (Javascript required) for those interested:

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