Transonic Methods for Oblique Flying Wing SST

This contribution is a review of results from a collaboration of 20 years in trannsonic design between the first author and R. Seebass who passed away during the early preparations of this conference. We therefore focus on applying our research results to the final project of this cooperative work, a novel concept in supersonic transport: Aircraft with an antisymmetric wing arrangement has been proposed originally by (1972). A wing-only configuration of this kind became known as the Oblique Flying Wing (OFW) which has attractive aerodynamic and other advantages over conventional aircraft. (1994) has pointed this out in his well-renowned Durand lecture. Funding for promising work at Stanford and NASA by Van der Velden (1989) was terminated much too early, our own modest theoretical work in aerodynamics of the OFW was funded by the German Max-Planck-Research-Award, see (Ed.). Systematic design work for the OFW concept was especially benefitting from our transonic work of years before, namely applying and extending the “Fictitious Gas’ method to find optimized wing shapes in the high speed regime. A summary of this effort is therefore illustrated in this contribution.