CHINA'S NORTHWESTERN POLYTECHNICAL UNIVERSITY has flown a subscale model of a 300-330-seat blended wing body (BWB) airliner concept, the BWB-300, designed in collaboration with commercial aircraft manufacturer Comac. The 10.3-scale model was flown autonomously from the UAV flight-test center at Jingbian in Shaanxi Province on Jan. 30. A team led by the university has been researching the BWB concept since the late 1990s, and development of the design began in 2017. The low-speed model appears similar in size to the X-48B demonstrator, an 8.5-scale model of a 450-seat BWB flown by Boeing and NASA in 2007, and is larger than the Maveric demonstrator, a subscale model of a 200-seat BWB airliner flown by Airbus in 2020.
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