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Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes
- AlexandrB 4y agohttps://archive.ph/hJUp6 https://archive.ph/hJUp6
- TheRealPomax 4y agopaywalled, unfortunately, but just based on the headline and image, this is probably "flying cars" levels of speculation? No commercial manufacturer builds a completely new airplane and brings it to airline-industry-market in under 15 years. Especially designs that have been around for many decades already and aren't being used because economic sense is the only sense that drives the airline industry.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ramesh31 4y agoI remember seeing renderings precisely like this in my middle school textbooks in the 90s, claiming the same thing. The truth is that commercial airliners are a solved engineering problem. We are at the absolute limits for speed, reliability, and safety that can be achieved with a flying machine in the earth’s atmosphere. Which is why the fundamental layout has not changed since the 707 was introduced over 60 years ago. Blended wing designs fall short on many of these constraints, namely the complete lack of inherent stability. With total power loss, they become completely uncontrollable. This is an acceptable tradeoff for military aircraft (modern fighters have the same issue), but not for civil aviation.
- daveslash 4y agoCame to the comments to make nearly the exact same remark. I, too, remember seeing these in middle school in the 90s, as well as high school. Though, they weren't in my textbooks - but were in the supplemental "educational magazines" that the science teachers would supplement their coursework with, and "Popular Science" magazines that the school had in the library.
- throw827474737 4y agoDito, but before doubting myself.. radical new, wow.
- AlexandrB 4y agoYup, I've been seeing these futuristic airplane concepts for most of my life, but commercial airframes seem to be converging to be more and more similar. Unusual elements like a third engine in the tail or horizontal stabilizers mounted above the rudder have largely disappeared. Given the thin margins in air travel, I suspect this is because this design is the most successful. It might be a local minimum, but when it comes to these radically different designs: "I'll believe it when I see it".
- hotpotamus 4y agoMy understanding is that tri-engine jetliners were actually more to fulfill a regulation than for engineering reasons. There are regulatory limits to how far a plane is allowed to fly on one engine called ETOPS - I forget what it really stands for, but the colloquial expression is: Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim. It used to be limited to around 2 hours I believe, meaning you've got a bit of time to divert and make an emergency landing. But if you're crossing the ocean, it's not really possible, so for a long time if you were crossing an ocean, you needed a 3 or 4 engined plane to do it. Jet engines are extremely reliable however, they fail on the order of several hundred times less often than piston engines, and are very well proven and have basically only improved, and so ETOPS rules have been relaxed quite a bit meaning that a lot more ocean crossing routes are available to twinjets.
- coredog64 4y agoExtended Twin Operations.
- jabl 4y agoYes, ETOPS ratings have been extended as engines have gotten more reliable. Another factor is that we have learned to make bigger engines as well. So nowadays with two engines you can power a pretty big plane. And due to how turbine efficiency tends to scale with size, two big engines is more fuel efficient as well as saves on maintenance costs vs. having more but smaller engines. For an extreme example, look at the B-52 with 8 engines. That was what was available back when the plane was designed, but nowadays the thrust from those 8 engines (about 600kN in total) can easily be exceeded by two modern large turbofans.
- dver 4y agoHere's some info on stability, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1000936121003125#:~:text=Since%20BWB%20aircraft%20eliminate%20the,stability%20characteristics%20are%20strongly%20coupled https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S100093612.... I think you're thinking of pure flying wings.
- inkcapmushroom 4y ago>speed, reliability, and safety The article states that other designs are being looked at due to improvements in other areas, namely sustainability and suitability to alternate fuel sources. I would think that if you had a design that came close in reliability and safety, sacrificing speed for better efficiency would be a good tradeoff on many commercial flights with passengers or cargo.
- runarberg 4y agoNo. commercial airliners are only a solved problem if you ignore the climate crisis. There is no way you can run the current design on electricity during intercontinental travel. This is the problem that engineers are trying to solve with innovative and radical design changes.
- upofadown 4y ago>With total power loss, they become completely uncontrollable. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marske_Pioneer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marske_Pioneer Note that this entirely powerless aircraft with a fairly high aspect wing and no tailplane first flew in 1968. Something that is basically a blob would be a lot easier to make inherently stable.
- alexpotato 4y agoInteresting historical note on the blended wing design: One of the main arguments against it was that designers weren't sure if people would be ok with sitting towards the center of the plane. The thought was that passengers wouldn't be comfortable without being able to at least see outside (even a little, looking at you 3/4/3 widebody planes). I mention this b/c there is a quote in Mary Roach's Flying to Mars. She mentions concerns around how astronauts will be able to psychologically handle the remoteness of space. As a similar example. they talk about how in Victorian England people were concerned that trains would be traveling so quickly that it would induce a state of shock in the passengers. This turned out to not be the case at all. In fact, she quotes a cosmonaut who says "Only people think this is problem is psychologists".
- nervousvarun 4y agoThis "problem" goes away if you just have one of the feeds in the seat-back entertainment system be a wing mounted camera view no?
- kridsdale2 4y agoMaybe if you had it in stereo 3D and gave the passengers a VR display.
- tengbretson 4y agoIf that were true, why would the person be on the plane in the first place? Couldn't they just watch a movie of their destination or zoom call the person they were visiting from home?
- nordsieck 4y ago> If that were true, why would the person be on the plane in the first place? Couldn't they just watch a movie of their destination or zoom call the person they were visiting from home? It can be the case that both: * watching a video of the plane moving through the air is an effective way to mitigate some of the discomfort of flying * meeting face to face with someone is valuable enough that it's worth taking the flight
- camillomiller 4y agoCall me when they've solved seats in such planes. If you put them in a central "barrel" like in a current plane it would be a bad use of the available space. Yet you can't do otherwise. Because of the heavy banking when the plane turns, you can't seat people far away from the central axis and closer to the side edges of the V shape.
- FriedPickles 4y agoInteresting point. Cargo and fuel should be placed on the far sides. Passengers towards the center, perhaps on two levels. Routes could be adjusted to decrease typical bank angles. Makes me wonder if we'll have cargo-only planes that converge on a different optimum. In full autonomous mode, comfort is not a factor and reliability can also be relaxed. Of course, we'd lose the flexibility of being able to convert the plane for passenger service.
- willnonya 4y agoWhy would reliability be relaxed? Other than just being silly on the face of it reliability is still important in cargo. It's even more important in the perception of aviation.
- FriedPickles 4y agoFor the same reason we don't cover cars in 3" thick steel armor. It's still very important–planes and cargo are expensive. But overall cost might be optimized without quite as many zeros. This is why old planes long since retired from passenger service are now used for cargo flights, which have an 8x higher accident rate. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=212692335 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=212692...
- robotresearcher 4y agoBank accelerations must be limited, not angles. You could do a full roll without noticing if the acceleration vector pointed mostly through the plane’s floor.
- rdtwo 4y agoNo they aren’t. Airplanes like boats are certified in such a way that the regulations assume that all future airplanes will look like past airplanes. As such any deviation from that standard form is super expensive because you need to have the regular create an updated set of rules. That takes years and years and tons of money/risk It may make sense from a physics point of view but not from a business view.
- scarier 4y agoTake a look at 14 CFR Part 23. The standards are performance-based. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any kind of proposed aircraft design that doesn’t fall into existing categorization.
- rdtwo 4y agoIt’s the details that get you. Things like door designs visibility, control expectations.
- medion 4y agoSame thing happens with construction planning - very hard to get anything “unusual” through planning departments if it doesn’t just conform to existing methodologies, design, and often even size. Hence why movements like the tiny house movement have such a hard time - the rules were designed when building was affordable - now it’s not.
- rdtwo 4y agoYeah but one of the reasons why stuff isn’t affordable is because regulations are designed around edge cases without factoring the cost sufficiently.
- carabiner 4y agoPuff piece as we head into the weekend. Not a bad summary of decades old concepts, but Boeing won't touch these things due to shareholder conservatism even though they are fundamentally better than the tube with wings. If there were a SpaceX of commercial jets, this is what they would build.
- ozzythecat 4y agoI was going to call it a puff piece, but as far as Boeing is concerned: > Boeing won't touch these things due to shareholder conservatism My spouse worked for Boeing. My son currently works for Boeing. Change is the slowest and most difficult thing to bring about at Boeing. It’s part of Boeing’s DNA.
- keepquestioning 4y agoTell them to work for Boom Aerospace.
- carabiner 4y agoExactly. I worked for Boeing as an intern and the entire industry is like this. It's basically 90% of aerospace, outside of the startups, is like IBM, Oracle. These companies have extraordinary history (facilities from WW2! god damn museums with their products! rise and fall tied with global geopolitics, seeing armed security and international VIP's at the guarded entrances) but will never innovate unless put up against a wall. At my university, wind tunnels had a black curtain that could be used to conceal the test section contents. During the Cold War, they used it to prevent casual onlookers from witnessing confidential design work for the govt.
- renewiltord 4y agoScenes when airport design constrains this more than engineering.
- shahbaby 4y agoWho will be held accountable when this fails and people die?
- inkcapmushroom 4y agoBoeing has proven that you don't need a radical plane design to have it fail. So probably the same people that were held accountable with the 737 Max killing 346 people.
- aeternum 4y agoWho will be held accountable if it turns out to be safer and it is the traditional designs that are actually killing people. Too often we fixate on blocking new tech in the name of safety. If a new design does turn out to be safer (which is almost always the case) why don't we consider the lives that could have been saved? As a concrete example, how many lives were lost because we took many months to approve the Covid vaccine? Who's accountable for those deaths and for showing it could not have safely been done sooner?
- Someone 4y agoFTA: “NASA in June launched a competition for U.S. companies to design and build a full-scale demonstrator. The rules require entrants to target planes around the size of a Boeing Co. 737 that can carry 150 passengers. The agency wants a prototype that could fly as early as 2027 and be ready for mass production in the next decade.” How does that fit in NASA’s mission? Also FTA: “Entrants to the NASA competition had to demonstrate their designs can be mass-produced at 60 planes a month” That’s serious. For reference, there are about 11,000 Boeing 737s, produced over about 55 years. That’s about 200/year or 17/month on average. Reading http://www.b737.org.uk/production.htm http://www.b737.org.uk/production.htm claims “The production rate has increased from 31 aircraft a month in 2005 to 42/month in 2014 and reached 57 aircraft a month by 2019 for the 737MAX.”
- CrazyStat 4y ago> How does that fit in NASA’s mission? That first A there in NASA stands for Aeronautics. Advancing aircraft design and technology is part of NASA's mission. It's even in their official mission statement: > NASA explores the unknown in air and space, innovates for the benefit of humanity, and inspires the world through discovery.
- iLoveOncall 4y agoI recommend this video from the channel Wendover Production (a lot of stuff related to transportation and supply vhain), which explains what is actually the plane of tomorrow (or rather the plane of 2050): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ql0Op1VcELw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ql0Op1VcELw Spoilers: It's essentially the same as today. As in, the exact same model. Maybe even the same plane that you flew in already if it's a recent release like the 737 Max. Before that video I had never thought about the age of the plane I am in, but turns out a lot of the planes I flew in were older than I am.
- giantg2 4y ago"New" designs. Ok. Pretty sure variations on most of these have existed for decades. There have been tons of radical looking aircraft designed and even in limited production (in private aviation), but just because it's radical doesn't mean it's really new.
- googlerx 4y agoYup https://simpleflying.com/the-mcdonnell-douglas-blended-wing-concept/ https://simpleflying.com/the-mcdonnell-douglas-blended-wing-...
- PicassoCTs 4y agoIdea: How about a blended wing aircraft - that never has to land? Fuel, Passengers, luggage and waste arrive via shuttles from the airport, while the plane circles slowly, docking in flight? Other passenger and personal on end of shift. Leave the same way, to other shuttle craft and the plane flies ever onward. Only reason to ever land is maintenance which can not be performed mid flight. In theory, a specialized shuttle might even switch an engine mid-flight if its constructed for it. For the landings that are unavoidable other special shuttle-craft attach and bring along wheels or flotation packages. Emergency landings? Just go with a set of parachutes, after arresting momentum. Or with flotation devices. The resulting craft would be lighter, more economic, the downtime by its very nature would be lower. Airports would not have to be rebuild, except for the spoke which harbors the albatrosses.
- bmitc 4y agoAll I can think is: yea, they're called high-speed trains.
- moffkalast 4y agoThey really ought to get around to building that transatlantic track
- q-big 4y ago> They really ought to get around to building that transatlantic track In the past, concepts for a transatlantic tunnel that is used by advanced trains were conceived: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_tunnel
- bmitc 4y agoThe article didn't mention anything about Transatlantic or overseas flights and neither did I. Short, regional flights are the worst offenders for emissions, and that's what trains and high-speed trains would address.
- scythe 4y agoChina actually did propose a train running through Siberia and Alaska to connect the whole world. It would be mighty impractical to ride from New York to London the "wrong" way, though.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoIf all travel were like the Eurostar I’d be doing a lot more of it. Honestly feels like you get there before you’d even be on the runway with flying.
- xhkkffbf 4y agoThe thing that shocked me about this documentary about the 747 is the claim that they went from napkin sketch to working prototype in just 20 months. Twenty months!!! The world is a different place now. https://www.amazon.com/747-Jumbo-Revolution-Christopher-Spencer/dp/B07L4Z1TSZ https://www.amazon.com/747-Jumbo-Revolution-Christopher-Spen...
- davidw 4y agoAs someone who does not like heights or flying, I would gladly sit smack in the middle of the wedge-shaped plane.
- karaterobot 4y ago> Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes that would use less energy and lower emissions. But will passengers be willing to board them? They don't really explore the question in this subtitle very well. There's like one line late in the article about "passenger acceptability is one of the criteria built into its contest", so the short answer must be yes. I assume the longer answer is "Yeah, of course. Passengers of commercial airlines already put up with a lot of terrifying, uncomfortable, dehumanizing things, there's no reason to suspect they'd be so spooked by airplanes that look different that they decide never to travel."
- S201 4y agoYeah, I always roll my eyes at the phrase "passenger acceptability." For example, a few years ago there was this idea that passengers would not fly on the 737 Max after it re-entered service in the US. Which is nonsense since I'm willing to bet that 90% of passengers can't identify if the plane they're on is Boeing or Airbus let alone care about individual models. The only "passenger acceptability" metric is what does the ticket cost?
- riversflow 4y agoHow would you evacuate a design like this in 90 seconds while also maintaining the profile that enables it to be more efficient?
- pencilguin 4y agoAirframes equipped to use LH2 will, wherever deployed, lock out competitors without, because the lower takeoff fuel weight allows for more paying cargo instead, and because hydrogen electrolysed right there at the airport should be cheaper per joule than petroleum mined, transported, refined, and transported again. But inboard LH2 tanks seem to present a safety hazard, wings have not enough room. That seems to leave underslung nacelles. None of the concept designs illustrated have them.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoThis has been tried over and over without commercial success. Ground effect vehicles were supposed to replace intermodal cargo container ships too. It ain't gonna happen this time either.
- andsoitis 4y ago> But a new jetliner design will likely face one of the same challenges seen in the nascent air-taxi business: convincing people to fly on something unfamiliar. How much innovation is kneecapped out of the gate because of human behavior that cuts it down like a scythe?
- remarkEon 4y agoAlways cool to see new designs, but I’m skeptical any of this becomes reality. I’d always assumed the lack of innovation in aircraft design had to do with safety. A long tube that’s not too wide makes for easy egress of passengers in an emergency. A blended wing design does not. I would imagine it very difficult to get something like that past the FAA unless there is some exotic form of emergency escape that’s part of it.
- supernova87a 4y agoMaybe someone here knows, but I'm always skeptical of any such news where there's not a single numerical figure in the story about the cost or operating difference. What is even the order of magnitude of fuel or operating cost improvement envisioned from these new designs? 10%? 30% Similarly when any story is written about biofuels for example ("airline <x> demonstrates passenger flight using biofuels"), but the article doesn't quote a single dollar figure on the cost per gallon, you know it's just another story that comes and goes every year, but no significant new progress has been made towards actual sustainable/scaled possibilities.
- Markoff 4y agoDid something change regarding wing idea? Highly recommended Mustard video (their videos have great production quality) why one wing design didn't take off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dByvPIyIbZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dByvPIyIbZE
- lm28469 4y agoEvery time I read something about new plane techs I go and read that article again: https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm > Finally, in the 50's, Boeing ushered in the Jet Age with the Boeing 707, which could cross the Atlantic ocean at nearly 1,000 kph. > I submit to you that the last thing that Boeing engineer would expect to see in 2014 is what actually happened. Here is today's most advanced passenger aircraft, the Boeing 787. > Unless you are an airplane nerd, you would be hard pressed to distinguish the 787 from its grandfather. And in fact, this revolutionary new plane flies slower than the 707.