Talk:Flying wing

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This article at present misses another factor in the design of a stable flying wing. With a normal aerofoil, as the angle of attack increases, the centre of pressure moves forward, which further rotates the wing to a higher angle of attack, and so on - a runaway effect that causes the wing to rotate backwards unless counteracted with the tail surfaces. On a flying wing, this effect must be reversed for stability, and this is achieved by using a "reflex" aerofoil section where the CP moves backwards with increasing angle of attack (This is table because this movement drops the wing reducing the angle of attack - so it will fly stably in equilibrium). A reflex section starts off like a normal aerofoil at the front, but is curved upwards towards the rear, so that the trailing part off the upper surface is concave rather than the conventional convex. This can be seen in the photograph of the B-35 at the wingtip. I think this needs to be worked into the article, which presently suggests that stability is achieved solely using sweepback, which isn't the whole story. Graham 00:23, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] About use of digital flight control system on flying wings.

Modern digital flight control systems enable flying wing designers to move the the GC aft of the AC. While statically unstable, the digital flight control system constantly produces correction movements in all control surfaces to keep the flying wing in level flight.

This is significant because both the B-2 and future flying wings (as well as blended wing bodies) are or are going to be digitally controlled. B-2 is statically unstable.

Please also note that stabilization of a flying wing does more than just providing trim in pitch. The lack of conventional tails makes flying wings exceedingly complicated to deal with things like adverse yaw. In fact, to properly roll a flying wing all pitch, yaw and roll controls are deployed. This will be hard especially without digital flight controls. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Benhongh (talk • contribs) 09:27, 1 April 2007 (UTC).