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Originally Posted by Jerry Irvine
You're really talking about flying wings. Modern jets have winglets now both top and bottom. Near flying wings with a big tube holding bioflesh inside between them.
Jerry
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No. A flying wing is an all-wing aircraft, while the term "tailless aircraft" (flying wings *are* tailless, of course, having no separate horizontal stabilizer) is applied to aircraft that have conventional fuselages, but have no horizontal stabilizer (some such aircraft are "borderline" cases, and are called both flying wings and tailless aircraft by different people). Also:
Straight-winged ("plank") and swept-winged flying wings and tailless aircraft (some people call planks--such as the Fauvel sailplanes--flying wings because their pod fuselages are very short, not much longer than the wing chord) are very short in relation to their wing spans (unless their wings are *very* sharply swept back, akin to a delta-winged aircraft's leading edge sweepback). Tailless aircraft like the SM-62 Snark and its XSSM-A-3 test vehicle (see:
http://www.designation-systems.net/...app1/sm-62.html ) are longer in relation to their wing spans. The Navy's Regulus I cruise missile (see:
http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-6.html ) was also laid out like this, having a normally-proportioned fuselage with a swept back vertical stabilizer--but no horizontal stabilizer--at its rear, with swept back wings mounted about halfway between the nose and the tail. A few drones and aerial targets also had/have similar configurations. Now:
This, and their normally-proportioned fuselages (and the mass distributed in their fuselages), give such tailless aircraft longer pitch (and yaw) moment arms, which should reduce the "hunting" in pitch that occurs (particularly in breezy conditions) in short flying wing and tailless aircraft. The boost-glider (and rocket glider) concept that I described above has a longer fuselage (of the boom type, as used in conventional-configuration boost-gliders such as the Falcon, Hawk, and Sky Slash II), which makes it similar in planform to the Snark, the XSSM-A-3, and the Regulus I.