Taylor Rains
5 min read
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Airbus’ CEO said the next generation of commercial aircraft could look like the B-2 bomber.
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The design combines the fuselage and wings into one giant wing with the cabin built inside.
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It promises better fuel burn and passenger space, but it may have few windows.
The future of aviation could look surprisingly similar to the triangular paper airplanes you folded as a kid.
In an interview with Tobias Fuchs and Martin Murphy at the German newspaper Bild, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said that over the next 30 or 40 years, planemakers may abandon the traditional tube-and-wing layout for a single, thick wing with the passenger cabin built inside.
This design — known as a “blended-wing body,” or BWB — distributes lift across the entire sweeping wing, allowing for heavier carrying capacity and greater efficiency than conventional jets. Faury said a widebody aircraft would be “better suited” for the concept.
He added that the BWB benefits come with trade-offs, including the possibility of eliminating windows. Passengers wouldn’t receive any natural light, and some could get disoriented or experience claustrophobia.
Emergency evacuations could also be challenging: passengers and crew would have no view of what’s going on outside, and those in the cabin center would be farther from exits than on today’s jets.
Faury’s comments are the latest sign that Airbus sees opportunity in the blended-wing design, an area where it faces competition from new aircraft makers seeking to beat Airbus to market. The BWB design has a long history.
The Northrop B-2 Spirit stealth bomber — often cited as the best-known “flying wing” aircraft — first flew in 1989. Although the BWB concept dates back even further, renewed interest emerged in the early 1990s when McDonnell Douglas explored a blended-wing transport idea that eventually evolved into the BWB-17 in partnership with NASA.
After McDonnell Douglas merged with Boeing in 1997, Boeing continued the work with NASA to produce the X-48 series of subscale demonstrators until the program ended in 2013.
But, to date, no full-size passenger BWB has been certified or flown, and Boeing has not announced plans to develop its own.
For its part, Airbus has been exploring BWBs since 2017, and the company’s 200-person design is a key pillar of its ZEROe initiative for zero-emission aviation.
In 2019, the company flew a small-scale demonstrator that showed potential major fuel savings — estimated at around 20% — and new cabin layouts made possible by the wider interior. The long-term vision includes running these aircraft on hydrogen rather than traditional jet fuel.
