China tests 85-meter flying-wing airliner model

A stainless-steel model less than a meter long is carrying an unusually large ambition inside CARDC’s 2.4-meter transonic wind tunnel. The Chinese research center is testing a 1:52 scale model of a flying-wing airliner designed, on paper, to carry more than 800 passengers.

The proposed aircraft would abandon the familiar tube-and-wing layout used by Boeing and Airbus. Its entire body would contribute to lift, creating a structure 85 meters wide and 43 meters from front to back. That is a markedly different scale from today’s commercial aircraft: Airbus A380 configurations typically seat about 555 passengers.

The reason to make the airplane so broad is aerodynamic. By combining the fuselage and wings into one lifting shape, engineers aim to reduce drag and generate more lift across the aircraft. CARDC’s Li Yonghong and his team are studying whether a higher lift-to-drag ratio could support longer flights and lower energy consumption. The concept targets a cruise speed of Mach 0.8, with a reference wing area of about 1,395 square meters.

The wind-tunnel model was tested from Mach 0.4 to Mach 0.8, while researchers measured airflow transitions, stability and structural deformation. It reached a maximum lift-to-drag ratio of about 20 below Mach 0.7; at the target cruise speed, the figure fell to 17.6. Those results provide a benchmark for further aerodynamic models and testing methods, rather than a passenger-ready performance guarantee.

So what changes in practice? For now, nothing at the airport: CARDC has announced no full-scale prototype, and the project remains a research platform. But it gives engineers a way to test the central promise of a giant flying wing—more lift with less aerodynamic drag—before the challenges of a full-scale aircraft can be addressed. The figures reported by Interesting Engineering come from the research program’s model tests.

The work places one civilian branch of China’s large-aircraft research alongside the C919, the planned 280-seat C929 and the proposed C949 supersonic passenger aircraft. The flying-wing concept began as a 250-seat design before being expanded toward the 800-passenger category. For now, its most concrete achievement is narrower but useful: a measured laboratory reference for a passenger-aircraft shape more often associated with the B-2 bomber.