Dream 2700 - A tailless tale: where it all started from

I've been always fascinated by flying wings and tailless sailplanes.
They look beautiful and simple, but reality is different. They own some very specific advantages, but at the same time there are several issues that must be mitigated with a very careful and complex design work.

Advantages.

• Their reduced directional stability allows to get on the other ends a very good spiral stability, and this is a plus for thermal soaring.
• A well designed tailles sailplane can reach good stall performances and can be very resistant to spins.
• Friction drag can be minimized.
• The design architecture is ideal for a motorized version. An engine can be easily installed in a pusher configuration (getting as well a stabilizing effect)
• It can be cheap to build, not having a long fuselage and tails.
• A flyign wing is absolutely a fascinating and very attractive design.

Disadvantages.

• In order to achieve good stability and control performances, several compromises needs to be taken, leading to a potential reduction in pure performance.
• The center of gravity allowable range is small, and must be precisely defined
•  Any control surface movement will affect the ideal lift distribution on the wing, producing an increase in induced drag
• Adverse yaw can be a big issue (but here there are new development helping us)
• Pitch damping is an issue, due to the very small inertia on the lateral axis. PIO (pilot induced oscillations) are not rare for flying wing designs
• Lateral stability can be an issue
• It is true that there only a wing to be build but, when it comes to swept wings, difficult aero/structural challenges are coming into the picture.

 I'm convinced that some of those critical factors can be overcome by a very critical design optimization.
In a tailless wing design, is very difficult to get the right trade-off between good performances, easy handling, and low production costs, when compared to traditional designs.
I'm very happy to see that this architecture is a bit revitalized nowadays (see Prandtl wing study at NASA), but the number of airplanes that will use this configuration will be still niche compared to the traditional architectures.
Nevertheless, the interest on some of the advantages given by that architecture, and the fashion connected to it, makes flying wing and tailless gliders far from disappearing from the scene.
I've been always attracted by both the design and the challenges connected to this configuration, and this is the reason why a started dreaming of my own tailles glider design.
The one in the picture below was my first concept.

My first design concept. (2000)

Dream 2700 - A tailless tale

I decided to open this page to share my passion about sailplanes, and in particular about tailless gliders. Since i was a child, flying has been my dream. Airplanes are my passion since ever. I started with control line models, moved to rc models, and after i started flying for real, with hangliders, paragliders, ultralights and sailplanes. Today i'm owning a beautiful LS6 sailplane, and a Niviuk Ikuma paraglider. I've been always dreaming about designing my own aircraft. This page is dedicated to the evolution of my ideas along the years. Today i'm finalizing the design of the last evolution of my concept. It's name is Dream 2700.