As the title asks, should we have a tag for questions about flying wing aircraft?
A simple search for "flying wing" on the main site brings up over 900 results.
If yes, should we also consider potential synonyms like [tailless]?
As the title asks, should we have a tag for questions about flying wing aircraft?
A simple search for "flying wing" on the main site brings up over 900 results.
If yes, should we also consider potential synonyms like [tailless]?
Sounds like a good idea to me. I could definitely imagine someone thinking "I want to learn more about flying wings" or "I want to answer some questions about flying wings."
(Heck, I want to learn more about flying wings. How does that even work?)
But I also feel like it'd make more sense to have the tag be called tailless or tailless-aircraft instead of flying-wing. If we created flying-wing, we wouldn't have a tag we could apply to other tailless aircraft; but if we created tailless, we could apply that tag to flying wings.
The tag description could be something like: Any aircraft that doesn't have a horizontal stabilizer or any other horizontal surface besides its main wing.
A few observations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_tailless_aircraft#Merger_proposal says:
Google books ngram viewer says that tailless is hundreds of times more common, but that must refer to animals. "Flying wing" has a blip from 1939 to 1945.
Does the existing blended-wing count? Perhaps we should discuss its related terms: What should the master term be? And shall we include the terms @TannerSwett mentioned in their response as more synonyms to whichever master term we decide on?
blended-wing
airplane aka Blended Wing Body might have a tail. A tailless airplane might not be a BWB. The terms are independent, Northrop's famous types notwithstanding.
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Aug 9, 2019 at 17:01