An article at GreenMuze.com discusses a pretty interesting sounding aircraft: the SmartFish. the blended wing design immediately suggests a quest for greater efficiency. The capabilities they're boasting their plane is capable of are pretty amazing. The SmartFish website says the technology could be applied from anything to small UAVs to business jets to midsize business jets.

So, is this one of those eternally under development concepts or a potential leap in aircraft design?

The news section of the SmartFish website shows some impressive looking computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results. On paper, it looks like this plane would provide a very smooth and efficient ride even at speeds as high as mach 0.88. If they could transfer that into the real world, it would truly be an impressive airplane.

Though this seems like pretty far-off technology, it may not be completely outrageous. The company already built and flew another aircraft called the HyFish. It was a small UAV powered by a hydrogen fuel cell that had some of the same blended wing type elements that the SmartFish will. It seemed to perform very well (take a look at a demo video here.) It demonstrated the team's ability to produce a design from scratch and integrate some complex systems into the design.

I'm not going to hold my breath, but I'm impressed by their efforts so far and I hope to see more from them.