The U.S. Air Force on Aug. 16 named JetZero as the winner of a $235 million contract to partially fund the development and production of the first full-scale blended wing body (BWB) demonstrator to achieve a first flight in four years.

The award completes a yearlong selection process managed by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and revives hopes for the BWB configuration as a possible new standard for future military and commercial transport aircraft.

Northrop Grumman’s Scaled Composites, as a subcontractor to JetZero, will build the Boeing 767-sized demonstrator for a first flight scheduled in 2027. Air Force funding will be combined with private investments to finance the demonstrator program, said JetZero CEO Tom O’Leary, speaking at a contract announcement event hosted by the Air and Space Forces Association. 

The demonstrator offers an opportunity to finally prove whether the theoretical fuel efficiency savings and short runway performance promised by the 30-year-old BWB concept translate to a full-scale, flying aircraft. By optimizing the inboard section of a blended wing to carry payload, JetZero proposes that the BWB configuration can achieve 50% fuel savings compared to a traditional “tube-and-wing” commercial aircraft.

“The Air Force looks at and says this, this needs demonstration. We need to prove this out,” O’Leary said. 

The Air Force is rethinking how to perform air refueling and airlift missions in future scenarios that expose traditional refuelers and airlfters to dangerous threats, even as they are required to operate on longer missions and smaller airfields across the Indo-Pacific military theater. 

“This blended wing body prototype demonstrator is very interesting to Air Mobility Command [AMC] because of the increased lethality of the joint force and the increased maneuver for us,” said Maj. Gen. Al Miller, director of strategy, plans and programs for AMC, speaking at the same event.

The Air Force soon will launch an analysis of alternatives for the Next Generation Air Refueling System (NGAS), which is expected to follow the Boeing KC-46 into development and production in the 2030s. The BWB configuration is one of several concepts that will be considered during the NGAS analysis, Miller said. 

The 2027 first flight schedule of JetZero’s still-unnamed demonstrator, however, makes such a configuration an unlikely candidate for the first iteration of the NGAS aircraft. 

But the NGAS program will likely be divided into multiple increments, with different types of aircraft introduced into service over time. The program’s acquisition strategy could follow the example set by the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), which also anticipates a family of aircraft that will be fielded in a series of increments, Andrew Hunter, the Air Force’s assistant secretary of acquisition, technology and logistics, told Aerospace DAILY on the sidelines of the award announcement.  

The Air Force’s funding contribution to the JetZero demonstrator completes a circuitous path toward a full-scale BWB aircraft. A McDonnell Douglas team led by Robert Liebeck and including JetZero founder Mark Page conceived of the BWB concept in the early 1990s. NASA funded a small, subscale demonstrator a decade later, which led to 122 flights of the Boeing X-48 between 2007 and 2013. NASA considered follow-on proposals to launch a full-scale demonstrator, but ultimately decided to fund the Boeing Transonic Truss-Braced Wing instead. 

In 2022, the Air Force’s Office of Energy, Installations and Environment stepped up to revive the BWB demonstrator, partnering with DIU to release a solicitation for competitive proposals.