Rise of the Blended Wing Body

The U.S. Air Force had awarded Long Beach, California aerospace startup JetZero $235-million to build an airliner-scale, piloted, Blended Wing Body (BWB) technology demonstrator in partnership with Northrop-Grumman and Scaled Composites. The funds will be distributed over a four-year period culminating, presumably, in a 2027 first-flight. The planned aircraft will be assembled at Scaled Composites’s Mojave, California facility and powered, ostensibly, by a pair of Pratt & Whitney PW100-series Geared Turbofan (GTF) engines. Though not ascribed, officially, to the USAF’s Next Generation Air-refueling System (NGAS) the JetZero demonstrator will likely inform the design of such.