Blended Wing Natilus Is the Mother of All Remotely Piloted UAV Freighters

Generally speaking, whatever machines we humans design to transport ourselves from place to place are pretty… pretty to look at. On the other hand, when it comes to cargo and freight transporters, looks are not exactly at the top of the list of priorities for the designers and engineers putting them together. Unless your name is Natilus.

The word probably doesn’t ring any bells, given how probably most of you coming here to autevolution are not in need of such services, but if the company manages to make these things a reality, it’ll probably be as famous as FedEx.

Natilus (like Jules Verne’s submarine, or the Lincoln SUV, only misspelled, and with wings) is a blended wing body (BWB) machine, meaning an aircraft that shows no clear distinction between its main body and the wings. Unlike flying wing aircraft though, or lifting bodies, when it comes to BWBs both fuselage and wings are there, only nicely hidden into one another.

Although this design comes with its share of disadvantages for passenger use (like, say horrible evacuation times during an emergency), it does come with a lot more advantages over conventional aircraft when it comes to cargo transport. And that’s exactly what Natilus is trying to exploit with plans to make not just one, but an entire family of remotely piloted UAVs shaped like this.

Read the entire article on Autoevolution.com.