Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

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Interesting historical note on the blended wing design:<p>One of the main arguments against it was that designers weren&#x27;t sure if people would be ok with sitting towards the center of the plane. The thought was that passengers wouldn&#x27;t be comfortable without being able to at least see outside (even a little, looking at you 3&#x2F;4&#x2F;3 widebody planes).<p>I mention this b&#x2F;c there is a quote in Mary Roach&#x27;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.<p>In fact, she quotes a cosmonaut who says &quot;Only people think this is problem is psychologists&quot;.

Call me when they&#x27;ve solved seats in such planes.<p>If you put them in a central &quot;barrel&quot; like in a current plane it would be a bad use of the available space.<p>Yet you can&#x27;t do otherwise. Because of the heavy banking when the plane turns, you can&#x27;t seat people far away from the central axis and closer to the side edges of the V shape.

No 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.<p>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&#x2F;risk<p>It may make sense from a physics point of view but not from a business view.

I 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.<p>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.

Puff piece as we head into the weekend. Not a bad summary of decades old concepts, but Boeing won&#x27;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.

&gt; 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?<p>They don&#x27;t really explore the question in this subtitle very well. There&#x27;s like one line late in the article about &quot;passenger acceptability is one of the criteria built into its contest&quot;, so the short answer must be yes.<p>I assume the longer answer is &quot;Yeah, of course. Passengers of commercial airlines already put up with a lot of terrifying, uncomfortable, dehumanizing things, there&#x27;s no reason to suspect they&#x27;d be so spooked by airplanes that look different that they decide never to travel.&quot;

&quot;New&quot; 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&#x27;s radical doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s really new.

The 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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;747-Jumbo-Revolution-Christopher-Spencer&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B07L4Z1TSZ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;747-Jumbo-Revolution-Christopher-Spen...</a>

FTA: <i>“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.”</i><p>How does that fit in NASA’s mission?<p>Also FTA: <i>“Entrants to the NASA competition had to demonstrate their designs can be mass-produced at 60 planes a month”</i><p>That’s serious. For reference, there are about 11,000 Boeing 737s, produced over about 55 years. That’s about 200&#x2F;year or 17&#x2F;month on average. Reading <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.b737.org.uk&#x2F;production.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.b737.org.uk&#x2F;production.htm</a> claims<p><i>“The production rate has increased from 31 aircraft a month in 2005 to 42&#x2F;month in 2014 and reached 57 aircraft a month by 2019 for the 737MAX.”</i>

All I can think is: yea, they&#x27;re called high-speed trains.

Maybe someone here knows, but I&#x27;m always skeptical of any such news where there&#x27;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%<p>Similarly when any story is written about biofuels for example (&quot;airline &lt;x&gt; demonstrates passenger flight using biofuels&quot;), but the article doesn&#x27;t quote a single dollar figure on the cost per gallon, you know it&#x27;s just another story that comes and goes every year, but no significant new progress has been made towards actual sustainable&#x2F;scaled possibilities.

Every time I read something about new plane techs I go and read that article again:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;idlewords.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;web_design_first_100_years.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;idlewords.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;web_design_first_100_years.htm</a><p>&gt; Finally, in the 50&#x27;s, Boeing ushered in the Jet Age with the Boeing 707, which could cross the Atlantic ocean at nearly 1,000 kph.<p>&gt; I submit to you that the last thing that Boeing engineer would expect to see in 2014 is what actually happened. Here is today&#x27;s most advanced passenger aircraft, the Boeing 787.<p>&gt; 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.

I 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):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ql0Op1VcELw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ql0Op1VcELw</a><p>Spoilers: It&#x27;s essentially the same as today. As in, the exact same model. Maybe even the same plane that you flew in already if it&#x27;s a recent release like the 737 Max.<p>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.

Scenes when airport design constrains this more than engineering.

Always cool to see new designs, but I’m skeptical any of this becomes reality.<p>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.

How would you evacuate a design like this in 90 seconds while also maintaining the profile that enables it to be more efficient?

Did something change regarding wing idea?<p>Highly recommended Mustard video (their videos have great production quality) why one wing design didn&#x27;t take off <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dByvPIyIbZE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dByvPIyIbZE</a>

As someone who does not like heights or flying, I would gladly sit smack in the middle of the wedge-shaped plane.

&gt; 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.<p>How much innovation is kneecapped out of the gate because of human behavior that cuts it down like a scythe?

Idea: How about a blended wing aircraft - that never has to land?<p>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.<p>Only reason to ever land is maintenance which can not be performed mid flight.<p>In theory, a specialized shuttle might even switch an engine mid-flight if its constructed for it.<p>For the landings that are unavoidable other special shuttle-craft attach and bring along wheels or flotation packages.<p>Emergency landings? Just go with a set of parachutes, after arresting momentum. Or with flotation devices.<p>The resulting craft would be lighter, more economic, the downtime by its very nature would be lower.<p>Airports would not have to be rebuild, except for the spoke which harbors the albatrosses.

This has been tried over and over without commercial success. Ground effect vehicles were supposed to replace intermodal cargo container ships too. It ain&#x27;t gonna happen this time either.

Who will be held accountable when this fails and people die?

paywalled, unfortunately, but just based on the headline and image, this is probably &quot;flying cars&quot; 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&#x27;t being used because economic sense is the only sense that drives the airline industry.

Airframes 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.<p>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.