Armstrong Whitworth proposed, during the World War 2 a design of a flying wing airliner powered by either six or four engines using a laminar flow. In order to test the design, a glider was built, knwon as the AW.52G which was roughly the half size of the final project.
The glider's construction began in March 1943 and flew for the first time on 2 March 1945, towed by an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bomber. A series of test flights with releases of around 30 minutes continued in a satisfactory way until 1947. As the first tests were successful, in 1944 Armstrong Whitoworth received permission to build two prototypes of the AW.52 which was going to be, in theory, a mail carrying aircraft.
It was intended to achieve high speeds and was an all-metal turbojet aircraft with retractable undercarriage and aerodynamically it had much in common with the glider as both had moderatly-swept flying wings with a central section having a straight trailing edge. The wings carried a small (though not on full chord) end-plate fin and rudders at their extremities and the rudders operated diferentially with a greater angle on the outer one. Roll and pitch were controlled with elevons that extended inwards from the wingtips over around three quarters of the outer swept part of the trailing edge.
The air intake was placed at the front in two holes which were directly connected to the engine which were two Rolls-Royce Nene centrifugal-flow turbojet delivering each of them 22,2Kn of thrust power. The cockpit was pressurised was slighlty set-off towards port.
The first prototype made it's maiden flight on 13 November 1947 and the second one (powered by the least powerful Rolls-Royce Derwent) flew for the first time on 1 September 1948. And the results were dissappointing as the laminar flow could not be maintained, so the maximun speeds were not as expected, although they weren't bad and, as expected for a tailess aircraft the take-off and landing runs were longer than expected.
The first prototype crashed on 30 May 1949 fortunately without any lost of lifes as it was the first time that an emergency seat-ejection was performed successfully by the British pilot J.O. Lancaster. The ejective seat was a Martin-Baker Mk.1 ejection seat.
Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_Whitworth_A.W.52
2. Midland Publishing - Secret Projects - Flying Wings and Tailess aircrafts
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H1tyMRtcho
