The U.S. Air Force has chosen California-based JetZero, founded in 2020, to construct and fly a Blended Wing Body (BWB) demonstrator to tell future cargo aircraft and the Next Generation Air Refueling System (NGAS), each of that are to operate in high-threat environments over long distances, including the Pacific theater.
“It is a prototype demonstration project that is meant to speed up the following generation of enormous aircraft the Air Force needs in the longer term,” U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said at an Air and Space Forces Association (AFA) forum on Aug. 16. “It’s a streamlined design that differs significantly from traditional tube-and-wing [aircraft] design. It should improve aerodynamic efficiency. There’s an actual potential on this technology to assist increase fuel efficiency significantly.”
Kendall said that the BWB concept has gained significant industrial interest and that the Air Force would really like to leverage industrial demand for BWB planes.
Under the BWB concept, the wings usually are not distinct from the aircraft body but blended into it, and the engine could also be on top of the aircraft or embedded within the airframe to offer more lift, range, payload, and fewer acoustic signature.
JetZero plans the BWB to enter service in 2030 and to have its first flight in 2027.
“As someone who’s lived this firsthand, I can inform you greater range increases lethality,” Ravi Chaudhary, assistant secretary of the Air Force for energy, installations, and environment, said on the AFA forum on Aug. 16. “Fuel efficiency conserves our energy resources and allows us to generate more sorties, and smaller noise footprints means survivability. Seamless ground ops reduce ground time and gets us airborne quicker, and in an era wherein installations will now not be the sanctuary they were in previous conflicts, this [BWB] capability is gonna be critical to deliver effects for theater commanders where and when it counts.”
Chaudhary, whose Air Force biography says that he served as a C-17 pilot in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, said that the Air Force has laid out $40 million in fiscal 2023 for the BWB demonstrator and about $200 million over the longer term years defense plan.
JetZero co-founder and CEO Tom O’Leary spoke on a panel after the announcement and said that fellow JetZero co-founder and chief technology officer Mark Page was a part of a team that developed the BWB concept greater than 30 years ago at McDonnell Douglas–now a part of Boeing [BA]–“and never let it [the concept] drop.”
Tom Jones, president of Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] aeronautics systems sector, said in the course of the panel that Northrop Grumman partnered with JetZero after the potential for such collaboration emerged a couple of 12 months ago. Jones said that Northrop Grumman subsidiary Scaled Composites–founded by aviation innovator Burt Rutan–will help develop and construct the BWB prototype using carbon composites and that Northrop Grumman hopes to bring its expertise in rapid prototyping and technology evaluation to the project.
Air Force Maj. Gen. Albert Miller, director of strategy, plans, requirements, and programs at Air Mobility Command, said in the course of the Aug. 16 AFA panel that BWB aircraft hold promise for Pacific operations requiring longer range aircraft that may land and take off from shorter runways.
Kendall spoke of the promise of BWB at a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) forum on Jan. 11 (, Jan. 18).
“Mobility is driven by the threat changes, by what the threat is doing to succeed in out to increasingly long ranges to have interaction our aircraft,” he said on the CFR forum. “Traditionally, we could take a industrial derivative aircraft, turn it right into a tanker or transport. Within the case of transports, we now have built purpose-built aircraft just like the C-17, but they essentially appear like a industrial aircraft. They’re not designed with a high set of necessities for survivability. The threat’s taking that freedom away from us.”
“We’re taking a look at–and it’s too early to have any results yet–at a next generation capability,” Kendall said in January, adding that a Blended Wing Body transport/tanker “is one in every of the very distinguished candidates.”
The Air Force’s Operational Energy Directorate (SAF/IEN), which has been sponsoring BWB, has said that tanker, cargo, and non-stealth bombers account for 60 percent of the Air Force’s annual fuel burn of 1.2 billion gallons and that BWB aircraft across the tanker, cargo, and non-stealth bomber fleets could save the Air Force $1 billion annually in fuel costs and yield annual emissions reductions of three.3 million metric tons.
SAF/IEN has worked with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and NASA to explore BWB design, performance, and long-term viability (, Aug. 4, 2022).
DIU has said that DoD is “the most important consumer of petroleum-based energy within the federal government, contributing to 77 percent of overall consumption.”
“Nearly all of that’s attributed to fuel for aircraft sorties supporting global operations,” per DIU. “A long time of research and development indicate that advanced airframes reminiscent of blended wing body aircraft present aerodynamic efficiencies that would each reduce fuel consumption and increase operational effectiveness, enabling longer-range sorties and reduced fuel logistics/supply chain risks.”