Initially conceptualised by Benad in 2015 as a highly swept flying wing aircraft to replace the A350-900, the Flying V design has since been refined in several later studies at both Airbus and TU Delft. The initial aerodynamic efficiency gain estimation was refined by Faggiano and Rubio-Pascual, confirming the interest of the solution. To prepare subscale test flights, wind tunnel tests were performed, showing a complex flow over the wing and providing an aerodynamic model predicting the longitudinal forces and moments in a given condition. In most of these works, the possible influence of the landing gear on the subject studied was mentioned, leading to consider its design. However creating the design itself is not the issue: landing gear have existed for as long as aircraft, thus methods exist to design them and they can be adapted to the Flying V. The more important question is about the influence of the gear on the aircraft: what are the consequences of adding a landing gear to the Flying V? This leads to a four step structure: choosing evaluation criteria for the gear, adapting the design method and criteria computation to work on the Flying V, validating the method and computations, and finally applying them to evaluate the consequences of the gear on the Flying V. Providing both quantified evaluation criteria and explicit design organisation, optimised design methods are used as support for the first two steps. The criteria retained are gear weight, ground manoeuvre, rotation ability, fairing drag, cabin floor height (equivalent to aircraft height from ground) and lateral stability derivatives. The last two were chosen after an exploratory study showing that the gear tends to be long, and
can be shortened by increasing wing dihedral. The design methods from literature are adapted by removing the optimiser, and limiting the amount of iterations required since the gear design space on the Flying V is not fully known, which require designer decision more frequently than on conventional
aircraft. Validation proves that the modified method is accurate when applied to the A350-900, with the only difference being a smaller gear track. Chosen for their simplicity, the empirical methods used to compute gear weight, shock absorber length (required in gear length) and stability derivatives prove to
be quite inaccurate. The other criteria are computed using geometry, and show much better accuracy since there is no assumption of the aircraft configuration as for empirical methods. Following the outcome of the exploratory study, it is chosen to study two airframes with modified dihedral in addition to the original Flying V. The first is chosen to bring the cabin floor at 5.5 m from the ground, the second to have gear as short as possible. The main gear on the original Flying V is 6 m long, placing the cabin floor also at 6 m from the ground for an estimated total gear weight of 12.8 t. This is 10 % higher than the A350-900,
and the gear is 20 % heavier than the A350-900 gear, for a similar mission and an expected lower takeoff weight. The other criteria are satisfactory. The gear on the modified airframes reduce in length by 12 to 56 %, while reducing in weight by 4 to 25 %, confirming the interest of varying dihedral as suggested in the exploratory study. Other criteria are unchanged by the dihedral variation,
except for the lateral stability derivatives. Comparing with an airliner, rolling moment derivative due to sideslip is found to be 3.5 times larger, raising the question of Dutch roll and of controlling the roll angle when landing with sideslip. The other computed derivatives are slightly better but not showing
interesting trends when dihedral increases. The consequences of a gear on the Flying V are then either to reduce the payload to accommodate the long and heavy landing gear, or to face undesirable stability derivatives if the gear is made shorter through dihedral.