Unless this has the capacity of a 737-700 / Max-7, there's no way six emergency exits are enough. They're also all up at the front, making egress difficult if an isle is blocked.
Yes, it's a nitpick, but if that's a design flaw that jumps out to a complete amateur with moderate aviation knowledge and no industry experience, it doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence.
This is part of why Boeing shut down the idea back in the 90s iirc.
But I think this company is not actually aiming to develop an airliner at all, it just makes for pretty pictures. Their demonstrator is being built for the USAF (along with Northrop Grumman and Scaled Composites), with a view to being used as a tanker and transport.
I'm sceptical. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Airbus have all investigated this exact concept over the last few decades, and none have gone forward with it.
> Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Airbus have all investigated this exact concept over the last few decades, and none have gone forward with it
Low incentives for taking risks and massive improvements in CAD and computer testing. A new airframe should always bring scepticism. But as someone with aerospace engineering training, it’s somewhat funny to see the space side of the market seeing more competition and thus innovation than the aero.
The old school rocket engines are still some of the most efficient engines ever created and most rockets never had a strong commercial market backing it so there was never pressure to try something else. The RS68 and RS25 are still amazing pieces of technology.
SpaceX succeeded because they were able to take advantage of NASA literally creating a commercial market (and also making an amazing engine that is "good enough" for 99% of payloads)
I think the person suggesting their more realistic short term goal is defense funding for future USAF tanker contracts might not be too far from the mark.
Whether the fuel economy of an airliner-sized tanker is enough to convince doubting airline execs facing very different operational constraints is another question.
These engines were horrible bad in terms of thrust or isp per $. And turns out that actually matters.
There had been a commercial market for a while, but US companies and their amazing engines didnt compete in it. Better to just feed of military contracts.
People made the same arguments about reusable rockets. If there’s one thing that saga taught us it’s that traditional aerospace is incredibly conservative and risk averse. “If it hasn’t already flown it can’t fly.”
Not saying this design is the answer but it’s quite clear that the opinions of the big players about novel ideas are to be taken with a certain amount of salt.
I’m not sure where this mentality came from. My guess would be many boom bust cycles and shifting political winds causing project cancellation. That probably burned people too many times on new projects. Combine that with a safety at any cost mentality and a lack of incentives to innovate.
Developing a new airframe is enormously expensive. This incentivizes reducing the risk of it as much as one can.
For example, when I worked on the 757 stab trim gearbox, my lead engineer suggested I do a design study on using a planetary gearbox rather than a differential gearbox. The former was significantly lighter.
The study went up a few levels of management, and was nixed because the differential box was a proven and well-understood design on other aircraft (747).
> If there’s one thing that saga taught us it’s that traditional aerospace is incredibly conservative and risk averse
Was that ever in doubt?
> I’m not sure where this mentality came from. My guess would be many boom bust cycles and shifting political winds causing project cancellation. That probably burned people too many times on new projects. Combine that with a safety at any cost mentality and a lack of incentives to innovate.
Look into the history of aviation. How many aircraft manufacturers disappeared or barely survived, usually no longer making civilian jets, because they made a wrong bet at the wrong time? How many disappeared because their planes got a bad reputation for being unsafe? Just a small selection off the top of my head: BAC, de Havilland, Bombardier, Lockheed, Dassault, Convair, McDonnel Douglas, Sud Aviation, Dornier.
A new jet design is extremely expensive, needs to add concrete benefits to the potential customers (airlines) and needs to be convincing for both airlines and passengers alike.
> People made the same arguments about reusable rockets.
NASA could have totally gone forward with developing the DC-3 if Nixon didn't cut their funding. The lower cross-range and payload were dealbreakers for the USAF but perfectly acceptable for civil spaceflight purposes.
> I'm sceptical. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Airbus have all investigated this exact concept over the last few decades, and none have gone forward with it.
Airbus has the ZEROe program to look at the future of aviation that is ramping up and should have tech demonstrators flying in the 2030s, exploring all sorts of options like open fan engines, hydrogen(-electric) propulsion, radical designs, etc. One of the concepts is the "Blended-Wing Body".
I'm skeptical too, but part I wouldn't necessarily write it off because a company like Boeing hasn't gone forward with it. Boeing won't even go forward with a redesign of the 737, preferring to go the cheaper route of continually modifying an existing design from the 1960s.
I do think there are other concepts that are farther along and have more promise like the Aurora D8 "double bubble" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_D8). Its design isn't as much of a departure, but it would still reduce fuel burn and noise significantly. Likewise, Boeing's TTBW (transsonic truss braced wing) design is promising especially since they have a full-sized demonstrator at this point.
But companies have been hesitant to invest in new types of aircraft. It's an industry that's essentially a duopoly where the big two have a decade worth of orders for their current aircraft. There isn't even a lot of competition between the two because neither has the capacity to produce more planes if they create something that airlines want. The A380 was probably the biggest risk that's been taken recently and that turned out to be a pretty big failure. I don't think either Boeing or Airbus wants to take risks when they have pretty guaranteed profits by staying the course. Boeing has even shelved its plans for the Boeing NMA (new midsize airplane) to replace the 737.
I'd also add that these projects often end up learning important things about aeronautics even if they don't become things you fly on. For example, one of the big things with the Aurora D8 was figuring out how to deal with boundary layer ingestion inefficiencies. Even if the D8 never becomes something you'll fly on, the knowledge gained there might be used in other planes that you will fly on.
You're right to be skeptical and I am too. It's really difficult to bring a new plane to market. However, I'm not sure I'd take Boeing and Airbus' reticence as evidence that it isn't worth exploring more. We've been talking about the bean counters taking over Boeing for months now and complaining about Boeing continually modifying the 737 rather than creating a new plane. Is it likely we'll be flying on these things? No. Even if it's a good and viable design, there's so much beyond that to get done. Actually manufacturing something as complex as a plane is very hard - there's a reason Airbus and Boeing have a decade long backlog of orders. But there's also a reason why places like NASA want to fund experimental projects like this - because there aren't really incentives for companies like Boeing to take risks on new designs.
I mean, you're right: this probably won't happen. At the same time, I think it's important to keep trying because sometimes these things do work and even when they don't work we often learn important things that can be applied in the future.
This is a valid point, but as a hobbyist pilot, damn that aircraft is beautiful. It may not replace the Boeing, but it would certainly replace a Gulfstream or Pilatus.
Looks like there are other use cases besides passenger jet - freighter and tanker won't need the extra exits.
Also one of the other mockup pictures seems to show multiple possible exits per side. Maybe there are only two regular-use exits at the front, with extra emergency exits on both sides a little further back, but which are not opened during normal operations: https://www.jetzero.aero/hubfs/Z5-0029-cloud-hero-GENX-JetZe...
Looks more like Max10 sized. It looks like there is a small door behind the wing, which matches the location of the back end of the cabin. There’s no window in them, but they are probably depicting the aft emergency exits, given regulatory requirements that exits be on both ends of the cabin. Based on the cut away, I think the large door aft of the main door, that has no window is likely the cargo hold door. It doesn’t look like there’s a hold under the cabin. The main door appears to be extra wide, which improves the exit capacity of the door, and reduces the actual number of exits required. There’s also the option for a ventral exit, but those are pretty rare on passenger airliners.
Does FAA mandate this particular safety feature or is it up to plane manufacturer?
Part of me wants to hire cargo plane, put bunch of bunk beds, call it 'cargo flight experience' and shuffle people between continents for 1/4th the price...
The FAA mandates that exits be distributed "as uniformly as practical" and requires certain numbers and types of exit according to the number of passengers [0] Also, at max capacity all passengers and crew must be able to evacuate in 90 seconds [1].
So, your cargo experience might have regulatory trouble. The "as uniformly as possible" might allow for a blended wing design though, provided you could get everyone out fast enough. There might be some other relevant regulations that I've missed as well.
Or, if engineers include an escape device such as a fold-out ladder in the mechanical kit that makes the skylights pop-out. Yes, that won't work for many disabilities without assistance, but it could still save many lives, and get them out of the way so those needing walk-off egress can get to the doors.
... I mean, emergency exits are largely a theater of safety, aren't they? Like oxygen masks and the flotation seat cushion?
Also, I'm curious, is CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) modeling still so poor that conceptual designs are still very uncertain when converting to a model or scaled down example?
No they arent. Wtf are you even talking about. We literally just had a crash on an A350 where everybody escaped threw the exit doors before the plane burned down.
Inost crashes most people escape threw the emergency doors.
There is a question how fast is fast enough. But fast escape are incredibly important.
How many lives would that really save? We've improved airline safety to the point that there's only a single major disaster every few years. Consider how few lives extra emergency exits have actually saved in the past decade. I would guess less than 10.
If that is the price we pay for a huge range of other improvements then I think it's worth it.
What an absolute rubbish idea. That's not how it works, at all.
There are so few lives lost thanks to the stringent requirements put in place, like the mandatory 90 second evacuation rule. Remove these requirements, and it's a guarantee that the numbers will go up, sooner rather than later.
Like most of those rules, the evacuation rules were established after a very thorough analysis of previous accidents, painstakingly determining who died where, and from which cause. It is not some number pulled out of thin air that is suddenly irrelevant thanks to "technology".
The MAX saga is a very good reminder of what happens when you start playing loose with those rules. People die. Quickly, and in mass.
And, as "luck" would have it, we are not even 3 months into 2024, and we have already been served the perfect, actual, counter example to this proposal: the JAL flight, where 379 lives where saved thanks to rapid evacuation.
I'll leave a nice little article link from January here. It just happens to have the perfect headline:
Well since you're against me anyway, let me double down: current airline regulations are way, way too strict in every way and are based entirely on an irrational overreaction people have to aircraft incidents because flying feels unnatural.
Increasing airline deaths to even over 1000 per year for marginally increased comfort would be worth it.
If anyone actually cared about saving lives then all focus would be on motoring, not planes. Planes should not be as safe as they are.
No, I'm not against you. I'm against an idea that is a dangerous gateway to certain death.
The current airline regulations are not way to strict. The current airline regulations are what they are to ensure, through lessons learned the hard way, that certain steps are taken to no make avoidable mistakes that have cost many lives in the past.
As for the lives lost to motoring, that's a completely unrelated problem.
It isn’t really completely unrelated though. I often drive for 6 hours between cities due to speed, comfort, and cost. I am certainly more likely to die for it.
> Increasing airline deaths to even over 1000 per year for marginally increased comfort would be worth it.
You're aware that if there are 2-6 major airline crashes per year, many people would skip flying all together, killing the industry in the process, right?
Not really. I feel it's sort of self-evident if you look at how the media covers aircraft accidents and how people are afraid of flying and talk about it. I don't know how to prove it though.
If you have another theory I'd love to hear it, but I think it's pretty clear that the public overreacts to airline deaths for some reason at least.
There literally was just a plane with 400 people in it that crashed. All of them escaped threw the exits and did so safly and efficently. The plane then burned down.
So literally just in the last few month your argument is wrong.
I feel like I see these kinds of proposed improvements to air travel (e.g. this, improved seat designs, improved volumes, etc), and yet, we're still flying in the same basic design with ever-smaller seat allocations as we have for decades. What are the chances planes like this will actually see the light of day in our lifetimes? It feels like i'm more likely to see fusion become a realistic contributor to the power grid than I am to see air travel change in any noticeable way (for the common flier at least, discounting fares like transoceanic business class).
Airplanes have changed, but in ways not immediately visible.
The Dreamliner is something like 80% composites by volume now, a material profile almost unthinkable 30 years ago.
But the visual dynamics of the design changes have been far less dramatic.
I do think we may see things change significantly with eVTOLs and battery tech improvements.
Major increases in energy density plus solid state (for safety) would probably trigger a Tesla-fication, and at that point the incumbents will inevitably be late adopters and some upstart is going to build something new looking.
Finally, if shape-memory polymers ever really take off, we could see some exciting things. Imagine a dynamically shaping airfoil, or, way out there, a wing which can translate itself from wide body to delta with almost no moving parts required to do so.
> Dreamliner is something like 80% composites by volume now, a material profile almost unthinkable 30 years ago
This—and no bleed air, fly by wire, et cetera—are big. But not on the level of air frame improvements. We’ve been stuck in a local optimum due to overconsolidation for decades now. We’re seeing it bleed into safety simply because complacence evolved into corruption.
I would love to see a regulatory world where experimentation outside of the high-end is more prolific. Even the constraints that were put on UAVs by the FAA have stifled that spirit in a real way.
Where is the hacker culture in aviation that we've been amazed by in the AI space? Even people doing cool things as small groups, like the black arrow guys, are just building in the same local minima.
> Where is the hacker culture in aviation that we've been amazed by in the AI space? Even people doing cool things as small groups, like the black arrow guys, are just building in the same local minima.
Well, a basic body + wings shape, anyone with moderate skill can construct that with a kit in their garden shed and fly it.
But all these exotic design ideas? These require immense amounts of compute power to design them so that they'll actually take off and substantial investment into manufacturing tooling to manufacture them, far surpassing the capabilities of all but a very few very rich hobbyists, and people with that kind of money generally don't subject themselves to the high operational risk of general aviation. Even in cars there's no one working on home-builds for carbon composite stuff, and the potential for failures and the risk of said failures to not just the pilot but everyone on the ground there is orders of magnitude lower than with planes.
And on top of that come the regulatory issues associated with anything that flies. There are many MANY MANY orders of magnitude less people with pilot licenses in the first place, most of Europe doesn't allow flights from anything else than a licensed airstrip (although the US is different there IIRC), and new designs require an immense amount of certification paperwork, which is also the reason why it took until last year to get unleaded fuel certified (whose rollout will take at least 3-5 years).
> Where is the hacker culture in aviation that we've been amazed by in the AI space?
I mean, if you mess up your AI model, it generates photos of black Nazis or people with an extra arm. Everyone laughs at you a bit.
If you mess up your plane, it kills people. There are absolutely people building experimental aircraft, but for good reasons there's a bit more caution involved.
Planes that kill freely consenting adults would be fine. But the tricky part is that this would also exclude employees of aircraft companies since they can't be directed to fly on such a plane. If the CEO of Boeing were willing to pilot an uncertified deathtrap of their own making over the ocean that should be allowed.
But it’s ok though, because the rest of us will just pick up the bill and clean everything up when Timmy-the-cowboys-unhinged-plane falls out of the sky over a populated area, or the ocean or something. No big deal right? Fuel and emissions don’t have an environmental impact, so people can just fly whatever they please around and the rest of us should just put up with it, because god forbid we put a stumbling block for those mighty captains of industry.
"sky over a populated area" seems like you're putting words in my mouth. I explictly said that having them fly over the ocean to avoid exactly this kind of externalty.
As for the environment, well, this is a self-limiting problem. Either it was only a small aircraft or they're rich and now dead and their money can be used for cleanup.
Modern airliners are drastically more fuel-efficient than planes like the 707. Fuel efficiency is often what drives a new design. The 757 I worked on came about because of a 35% more efficient engine design. The MAX came about because (drum roll) 15% more fuel efficient engines. These make for enormous operational cost savings.
Not sure if this is true, you can see that on any device with pressure meter (basically all 'smart' watches and phones), the standards are 2000-2500m altitude. Once you can create an altitude X inside the plane, you can do say 70% of X too.
I don't know. My bottles of water aren't completely flatten when we land, something that I remember was always the case. Keeping in mind flying in the 90s means taking planes manufactured in the 70s and 80s (including a Caravelle!).
And yet Boeing has yet to backport all that fancy carbon fiber and stuff to their bread and butter 737…
Just because a 737 is used for shorter flights doesn’t mean people wouldn’t want higher air pressure, higher humidity, larger windows, quieter cabins, etc…
So disappointing they keep cranking out the current 737 lineage.
The airframe designers don't decide the seat space per passenger.
They can include all of the spacious reclining seats and lounge sofas as they want in the design, and airlines will spec it with seats and seat pitches that produce the greatest profit per flight by maximizing the number of passengers within the limits of safety regulations.
Last one was the 737 Max in 2017. It’s a derivative. The last truly new frames were the 787 in 2011 and A380 in 2006. Both focussed on subsystems, propulsion and materials for their novelty; only one has been a commercial success.
One successful (two attempted) new airframes in over two decades is extraordinarily slower than the pre-consolidation frequency. It is also notable that neither attempted to introduce a new air frame that directly competes with the other’s; Airbus and Boeing trade market segments. There is zero head-to-head competition.
Modern planes are a marvel of engineering. And newer planes are more comfortable. That doesn’t change that we’re stuck in a local optimum due to a cessation of risk taking.
There's been more competition in the regional market including clean sheet designs by new entrants, but they're all conventional tubes and wings and podded turbofans too. China's state funded A320/737 competitor is a clone with a shared engine platform too.
Improving on current generation airliners is hard compared with improving what flew between 1920 and 1950, and consolidation happened because it wasn't profitable. Airlines and financiers don't like uncertainty either.
Why do you keep thinking competition is what prevented blended wing bodies? Blended wing bodies make big trade offs that don't neatly fit with commercial flight.
The analysis of different lifting bodies is fairly fundamental aeronautical engineering work every student learns. There is no weird conspiracy here.
> OP asked why all planes since the 70s look about the same.
All commercial passenger airliners (and there are some exceptions there, but in different directions than blended-wing-body) look about the same, but not all airplanes do.
> It’s because there isn’t a sustained budget for experimentation.
No, its because there are various technical challenges with blended wing-body aircraft that have to be balanced against the reduced drag and resulting better fuel efficiency, such as structural challenges if you want continuous internal cabin space; access if you want to be able to evacuate them as efficiently as a tubular fuselage aircraft, etc. Some of those have had progress over the years (e.g., the structural ones) as material science has advanced.
There are blended-wing-body designs (or the related but more extreme flying wing design) that have been produced, mostly as experimental or military aircraft (several US strategic bombers have been blended-wing-body or flying wing designs: the B-1 is a blended-wing-body (also with variable sweep wings), B-2 and B-21 are flying wing designs.)
> Never said as much. OP asked why all planes since the 70s look about the same. It’s because there isn’t a sustained budget for experimentation.
Bullshit. There is tons of money for innovation, every single manufacturer is trying to squeeze 1-2% efficient improvements across the board. To say there is no funding for innovation is hilariously ignorant.
> Never said as much. It’s not exactly groundbreaking for entrenched supplies to cease innovating and focus on extraction.
Cool, can you show me what numbers you're looking at that even hint that these blended wing bodies are better than contemporary commercial designs?
> Cool, can you show me what numbers you’re looking at that even hint that these blended wing bodies are better than contemporary commercial designs?
Department of the Air Force Climate Action Plan, October 2022 [0] (p17)
“For example, development of blended wing body aircraft could drive transformative changes, as this aircraft design increases aerodynamic efficiency by at least 30 percent over current Air Force tanker and mobility aircraft” [Note that Air Force tanker and mobility aircraft are similar to, and in some cases simply militarized versions of, commercial airliner or air transport designs.]
The same report (p19) identifies development and testing of a full-scale blended wing prototype by FY27 as a Key Result of the Action Plan.
I heard almost the same out of a Lockheed executive about launch about a decade and a half ago. A dollar of R&D can travel differently at a cushy corporation than at one in competition.
> can you show me what numbers you're looking at that even hint that these blended wing bodies are better
No, I have never defended this design—I have no specs. A better question is why you’re so convinced this optimum is the global one.
Both of you are correct - there is a duopoly because of the complexity, and the duopoly has no real incentive to change, given that the current local optimum seems to be working for the foreseeable future. There is no pressure to innovate, and a strong one to keep the status quo.
And yet efficiency gains are vigorously pursued and adopted, where real - and most recently, that has been with engines and composites. Meanwhile, the blended-wing concept has been experimented with for over a century, and it has never demonstrated a compelling improvement. Until I see a proposal that comes with a paper explaining what recent innovation has made things different this time, I will remain skeptical.
This is a multifaceted issue, involving the duopoly of commercial airline manufacturers, strict regulation, and massive subsidies.
It costs Boeing 10s of billions of dollars and usually around a decade to design an aircraft from a clean sheet, with very little incentive for truly disruptive innovation. Developing and testing a wholly new design like this would probably take double the time and more than double the cost. When your assembly, all testing, designs, control systems, and pilots have been optimized "wings on a tube" shape for 70+ years, I'd imagine it's difficult to pivot the core design that drastically.
I'm hoping to see some of the government subsidies shifted towards more competition with Boeing's recent failures, but lobbying is powerful, so we'll see.
I don’t think you’re likely to see a significant change to the flying experience (at least not for the better) as long as most customers continue to prefer the cheapest, most terrible option.
Maybe somebody succeeds with a delta-wing design, but the highest-profit configuration will still be to make the seats as cheap and terrible as possible.
There is a demand for more luxurious aircraft travel, but at the moment it's too costly to provide.
If BWBs become a thing, maybe the value of cabin space will decrease to the point where paying for a business class - or even premium economy - seat for long-haul travel is attractive for more people.
I did some Googling and apparently the base price ratio for business class to economy class is about 3.6 to 1. Some of that is all the other frippery - lounge access, priority baggage, better food, more personal service etc. etc. So at a rough guess providing just the bigger seat would attract a premium of maybe 3x economy class.
At the moment, New York-London with United is about $600 and business maybe $1800-$2000 (so perhaps a little bit under the expected premium, but in the ballpark). For most people, an extra $1400 is a big ask.
But imagine a world where the economy flight is $200 and business class $700. I suspect a lot more people would choose business class in those circumstances.
Some of the people who currently fly economy would start flying business, but a huge number of people who are currently taking Greyhound buses, driving, or choosing not to travel at all, would start flying economy.
I agree. I am disappointed that NASA abdigated its role in driving forward not only space but aviation to commercial interests. It made, and still makes, many people very rich, but profit motives lead to the masses to feeling, and being handled, like cattle.
I'm particularly frustrated by the dearth of general aviation as a means of travel outside of the wealthy. We built small airports EVERYWHERE, and in most cases they sit rotting in rural areas instead of being hubs of inter-city trade.
I have plans to change that, but the aviation space is notoriously coin-operated and high impedance. Even with funding it's going to require some serious SV-style hacking to change anything meaningfully.
This specific model of BWB, when overlayed with a 737/A320 seems to put the outer-most passengers at the approximate location of the nacelles on the narrow-body aircraft.
The nacelles on a 737 are BARELY wider than an A380. Is differential force an issue on the A380? It is one of the only models of commercial aircraft I have never flown on.
I am a window seat fan not because I can look out the window (although I generally do on ascent/descent) but because when I pass out in economy I don't end up resting my head on my seat mate's shoulder :)
To me the allure of the window seat has less to do with the window and more to do with what the window implies. I.e. it could just as well be called "the wall seat" and I'd get 95% the utility out of it.
Wasn't there some concept in airplane interior design to put displays in the walls so you could virtually display the outside like the aircraft wasn't even there?
Never really thought about how being far from the centerline would change how much/quickly you move in a roll, I can definitely see that feeling being unnerving, expecially the inevetable(though rare?) negative G moments.
Airliners have steadily gotten more fuel efficient at a rate of about 1.3% per year since the 1960s, driven by fierce competition.
If someone could produce a massively more efficient design then there’d be huge interest but when the risk of failure is so high, why would manufacturers take a chance instead of iterating on what is already proven?
In undergrad we had an alumni, who had climbed the ranks at Bombardier, come and talk about aircraft and engine evolution. They are 100% trying to make them as cost-effective as possible and fuel economy is a huge driver for that.
The challenge is that not only is there a huge upfront investment into a new unconventional airframe, with the associated risk of failure that you point out, but if you are successful you're now going to be completely retooling and retraining everyone since no one has experience mass producing airframes like this. For that kind of investment... you'd better have a pretty damned good cost or efficiency argument.
Apparently a 747 has a cruise L/D of around 17 and an A340 is around 19. The U-2 is up around 25. There's not a whole room left between what we've got now and gliders as far as L/D goes, so the only place really left to try to improve is the engines themselves... and modern high-bypass turbofans are really marvels of squeezing as much energy as you can out of a (relatively) lightweight piece of machinery. We build the hot bits in those engines out of, literally, magical single crystals of crazy alloys to be able run them as hot as possible to maximize their efficiency.
Just as an example, a lot of companies are using jets on short haul flights where a turboprop would be a lot more fuel efficient. On short trips the speed difference doesn't mean much.
Again, there's some complex calculation about training, fleet diversity, flights per airframe per day etc.
If fuel is cheap, it makes sense to use the more fuel gulping plane because other costs are better. If fuel is expensive, maybe it then makes more sense to use more turboprops even though it means other complications.
Turbofan engine compression ratio and bypass ratio have been increased but we are nowhere near the limits of total aircraft efficiency.
Just as an example, Perlan II glider has glide ratio of 43. Of course, it's for a totally different use case and useless directly as an airline. But as comparison the most efficient airliner, the ATR turboprop has glide ratio of about 15.
JetZero’s four-year development plan is due to culminate in flight tests of the full-scale demonstrator beginning in the first quarter of 2027. Sized around the capacity of a Boeing 767 with a wingspan close to that of an Airbus A330, the demonstrator will be built and tested in collaboration with Northrop Grumman and its prototyping subsidiary Scaled Composites.
It's an ambitious plan though, given that they have only just been granted licenses for their 1:8 scale model.
THIS! I put cookie popups on basically all my sites just to avoid having to screw with figuring out what minor analytics cookie might break some law somewhere.
> THIS! I put cookie popups on basically all my sites just to avoid having to screw with figuring out what minor analytics cookie might break some law somewhere.
Lazy question, but have any new products popped up in the past few years with guarantees around that question because of the apparent new market opportunities for compliant (read: less invasive / non invasive) site analytics software?
Well, they want to see what other jets you are buying and give you a good deal on in-flight entertainment, or free fuel for 2 cross Atlantic trips if you buy their jet.
Every website owner, that doesn't want to get shit on because they forgot to notify you they're dropping a cookie because they use google analytics or something else to monitor their site data.
Haha, nice timing that this appears after the "why are airplanes so hard to build?" article! Putting the engines to radiate sound upwards does make a lot of sense.
I was intrigued, but acoustically it doesn’t make a lot of sense really…the thrust exhaust where all the fast moving air comes out, also happens to be where all the loud comes out too. Their renderings don’t look like the engines are far enough forward for the fuselage to provide any significant obstructions to the path of sound from the exhaust down to the ground.
There's also the issue of ingesting the turbulent/detached boundary layer of the fuselage at high angles of attack, causing inlet distortions and the corresponding risk of compressor stall.
Also safety. Uncontained engine failures shouldn’t ever happen (and maybe happen less as technology gets better), but when they do happen, it’s better for them to be under the wing away from the fuselage rather than right in the path of critical control systems.
Since this is a blended wing with no vertical stabilizer, it might be different, but it does still look like there are control surfaces right next to the engines..
Not just the board. Their CTO came up with the idea (with two other legendary greybeards) years before most of us were sucking air. Mark's been at the heart of the LA aerospace scene for quite a while, is as intelligent as he is humble, and I'm genuinely happy that he's finally going to get an honest crack at this.
The gang is back together (Liebeck and Rawdon) and they even threw in Kroo for good measure. This has all the heavy hitters gathered under the same roof.
Holmes' board going into the scandal included an unusual roster of names for a healthcare startup, with leaders who had more experience in politics and government than healthcare
OTOH, JetZero's board include former executives of:
Airbus
Learjet
Gulfstream
AirFrance KLM
Pratt & Whitney
Major aircraft and jet engine makers as well as airlines. In other words, very strong industry knowledge and connections.
They are called skylights in buildings, I have to imagine being able to let in more natural light into the cabin, especially in a plane with such a wide body and corresponding distance between side windows is a generally good thing for humans.
Surprisingly so! Humans really don't like being confined, and travel is stressful enough as it is...
One of the options for my senior design project (~5 years ago) was designing an artificial skylight for a hyperloop-style vehicle. Evacuated tubes make natural lighting difficult, and they'd already determined this was going to be a major hurdle for making the thing an attractive option for passenger transit. They wanted it to respond to the vehicles movements as well. Cool project!
What this means to me, if not vaporware, is that either ticket prices will go down for the same space or I'll get much more room and not be so crammed into the seat. Maybe we can ride with more comfort, and have more standing moving room, like a train.
The job salaries aren’t competitive enough, and not matching the experience of years required AND the skills listed.. a front end programmer can easily make the same while working remotely and probably working another 2 jobs too.
The seating mockup feels uncomfortable to me as the rows angle towards one another. It's ok to face a stranger for a short train ride, but on a long flight I'd feel less comfortable.
On recent flights, I was surprised how many people who somehow chose a window seat, closed the window, during broad daylight. This is a big change from when I was younger, where so many more people had the window open and were interested in seeing what was outside. I wonder what changed? Is it phones? Is it sleep debt? Is it that they have flown 100 times now and the novelty is gone?
I always love listening to music and looking out the window.
The benefit of a window seat is not that you can look out (although it is fun on occasion). The biggest benefit (for me) is you don't have a stranger next to you on that side. You have a wall you can sleep against. This is a godsend on 10hr flights.
For me its usually I am tired and yeah, the novelty is gone, I flew for work for a number of years and had parents who were always sending me back home to the old country as a kid, it's been a long time since I have enjoyed flying.
How can anyone take this site seriously? It looks looks some stock Joomla nonsense from 2008 with a few cheap CG mock-ups of a jet that look amateurish at best.
Not a god look for a company claiming to disrupt the jet space.
Unless this has the capacity of a 737-700 / Max-7, there's no way six emergency exits are enough. They're also all up at the front, making egress difficult if an isle is blocked.
Yes, it's a nitpick, but if that's a design flaw that jumps out to a complete amateur with moderate aviation knowledge and no industry experience, it doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence.
This is part of why Boeing shut down the idea back in the 90s iirc.
But I think this company is not actually aiming to develop an airliner at all, it just makes for pretty pictures. Their demonstrator is being built for the USAF (along with Northrop Grumman and Scaled Composites), with a view to being used as a tanker and transport.
I'm sceptical. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Airbus have all investigated this exact concept over the last few decades, and none have gone forward with it.
> Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Airbus have all investigated this exact concept over the last few decades, and none have gone forward with it
Low incentives for taking risks and massive improvements in CAD and computer testing. A new airframe should always bring scepticism. But as someone with aerospace engineering training, it’s somewhat funny to see the space side of the market seeing more competition and thus innovation than the aero.
I don't think its THAT particularly surprising.
The old school rocket engines are still some of the most efficient engines ever created and most rockets never had a strong commercial market backing it so there was never pressure to try something else. The RS68 and RS25 are still amazing pieces of technology.
SpaceX succeeded because they were able to take advantage of NASA literally creating a commercial market (and also making an amazing engine that is "good enough" for 99% of payloads)
> old school rocket engines are still some of the most efficient engines ever created
Sure. But there are other niches than maximal ISP. SpaceX and other launch providers have demonstrated it.
In both cases—airlines and rocketry—there was latent demand once someone looked for it. And in both cases, I believe, public support is necessary.
I think the person suggesting their more realistic short term goal is defense funding for future USAF tanker contracts might not be too far from the mark.
Whether the fuel economy of an airliner-sized tanker is enough to convince doubting airline execs facing very different operational constraints is another question.
These engines were horrible bad in terms of thrust or isp per $. And turns out that actually matters.
There had been a commercial market for a while, but US companies and their amazing engines didnt compete in it. Better to just feed of military contracts.
People made the same arguments about reusable rockets. If there’s one thing that saga taught us it’s that traditional aerospace is incredibly conservative and risk averse. “If it hasn’t already flown it can’t fly.”
Not saying this design is the answer but it’s quite clear that the opinions of the big players about novel ideas are to be taken with a certain amount of salt.
I’m not sure where this mentality came from. My guess would be many boom bust cycles and shifting political winds causing project cancellation. That probably burned people too many times on new projects. Combine that with a safety at any cost mentality and a lack of incentives to innovate.
Developing a new airframe is enormously expensive. This incentivizes reducing the risk of it as much as one can.
For example, when I worked on the 757 stab trim gearbox, my lead engineer suggested I do a design study on using a planetary gearbox rather than a differential gearbox. The former was significantly lighter.
The study went up a few levels of management, and was nixed because the differential box was a proven and well-understood design on other aircraft (747).
> If there’s one thing that saga taught us it’s that traditional aerospace is incredibly conservative and risk averse
Was that ever in doubt?
> I’m not sure where this mentality came from. My guess would be many boom bust cycles and shifting political winds causing project cancellation. That probably burned people too many times on new projects. Combine that with a safety at any cost mentality and a lack of incentives to innovate.
Look into the history of aviation. How many aircraft manufacturers disappeared or barely survived, usually no longer making civilian jets, because they made a wrong bet at the wrong time? How many disappeared because their planes got a bad reputation for being unsafe? Just a small selection off the top of my head: BAC, de Havilland, Bombardier, Lockheed, Dassault, Convair, McDonnel Douglas, Sud Aviation, Dornier.
A new jet design is extremely expensive, needs to add concrete benefits to the potential customers (airlines) and needs to be convincing for both airlines and passengers alike.
And for the record, Airbus are working on a bunch of radical design moonshots: https://www.airbus.com/en/innovation/low-carbon-aviation/hyd... , and so are Embraer https://embraercommercialaviationsustainability.com/concepts... .
> People made the same arguments about reusable rockets.
NASA could have totally gone forward with developing the DC-3 if Nixon didn't cut their funding. The lower cross-range and payload were dealbreakers for the USAF but perfectly acceptable for civil spaceflight purposes.
> I'm sceptical. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Airbus have all investigated this exact concept over the last few decades, and none have gone forward with it.
Airbus has the ZEROe program to look at the future of aviation that is ramping up and should have tech demonstrators flying in the 2030s, exploring all sorts of options like open fan engines, hydrogen(-electric) propulsion, radical designs, etc. One of the concepts is the "Blended-Wing Body".
I'm skeptical too, but part I wouldn't necessarily write it off because a company like Boeing hasn't gone forward with it. Boeing won't even go forward with a redesign of the 737, preferring to go the cheaper route of continually modifying an existing design from the 1960s.
I do think there are other concepts that are farther along and have more promise like the Aurora D8 "double bubble" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_D8). Its design isn't as much of a departure, but it would still reduce fuel burn and noise significantly. Likewise, Boeing's TTBW (transsonic truss braced wing) design is promising especially since they have a full-sized demonstrator at this point.
But companies have been hesitant to invest in new types of aircraft. It's an industry that's essentially a duopoly where the big two have a decade worth of orders for their current aircraft. There isn't even a lot of competition between the two because neither has the capacity to produce more planes if they create something that airlines want. The A380 was probably the biggest risk that's been taken recently and that turned out to be a pretty big failure. I don't think either Boeing or Airbus wants to take risks when they have pretty guaranteed profits by staying the course. Boeing has even shelved its plans for the Boeing NMA (new midsize airplane) to replace the 737.
I'd also add that these projects often end up learning important things about aeronautics even if they don't become things you fly on. For example, one of the big things with the Aurora D8 was figuring out how to deal with boundary layer ingestion inefficiencies. Even if the D8 never becomes something you'll fly on, the knowledge gained there might be used in other planes that you will fly on.
You're right to be skeptical and I am too. It's really difficult to bring a new plane to market. However, I'm not sure I'd take Boeing and Airbus' reticence as evidence that it isn't worth exploring more. We've been talking about the bean counters taking over Boeing for months now and complaining about Boeing continually modifying the 737 rather than creating a new plane. Is it likely we'll be flying on these things? No. Even if it's a good and viable design, there's so much beyond that to get done. Actually manufacturing something as complex as a plane is very hard - there's a reason Airbus and Boeing have a decade long backlog of orders. But there's also a reason why places like NASA want to fund experimental projects like this - because there aren't really incentives for companies like Boeing to take risks on new designs.
I mean, you're right: this probably won't happen. At the same time, I think it's important to keep trying because sometimes these things do work and even when they don't work we often learn important things that can be applied in the future.
This is a valid point, but as a hobbyist pilot, damn that aircraft is beautiful. It may not replace the Boeing, but it would certainly replace a Gulfstream or Pilatus.
Looks like there are other use cases besides passenger jet - freighter and tanker won't need the extra exits.
Also one of the other mockup pictures seems to show multiple possible exits per side. Maybe there are only two regular-use exits at the front, with extra emergency exits on both sides a little further back, but which are not opened during normal operations: https://www.jetzero.aero/hubfs/Z5-0029-cloud-hero-GENX-JetZe...
https://aviationweek.com/aerospace/emerging-technologies/jet...
Looks more like Max10 sized. It looks like there is a small door behind the wing, which matches the location of the back end of the cabin. There’s no window in them, but they are probably depicting the aft emergency exits, given regulatory requirements that exits be on both ends of the cabin. Based on the cut away, I think the large door aft of the main door, that has no window is likely the cargo hold door. It doesn’t look like there’s a hold under the cabin. The main door appears to be extra wide, which improves the exit capacity of the door, and reduces the actual number of exits required. There’s also the option for a ventral exit, but those are pretty rare on passenger airliners.
Does FAA mandate this particular safety feature or is it up to plane manufacturer?
Part of me wants to hire cargo plane, put bunch of bunk beds, call it 'cargo flight experience' and shuffle people between continents for 1/4th the price...
The FAA mandates that exits be distributed "as uniformly as practical" and requires certain numbers and types of exit according to the number of passengers [0] Also, at max capacity all passengers and crew must be able to evacuate in 90 seconds [1].
So, your cargo experience might have regulatory trouble. The "as uniformly as possible" might allow for a blended wing design though, provided you could get everyone out fast enough. There might be some other relevant regulations that I've missed as well.
[0] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.807
[1] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.803
> Also, at max capacity all passengers and crew must be able to evacuate in 90 seconds [1].
With half of all emergency exits (assuming that something like a fire could be blocking the rest, which has already happened).
Where did you see it say there were only six emergency exits?
Those skylights? Just pop em out to exit in a hurry.
Only if it is inverted.
Or, if engineers include an escape device such as a fold-out ladder in the mechanical kit that makes the skylights pop-out. Yes, that won't work for many disabilities without assistance, but it could still save many lives, and get them out of the way so those needing walk-off egress can get to the doors.
... I mean, emergency exits are largely a theater of safety, aren't they? Like oxygen masks and the flotation seat cushion?
Also, I'm curious, is CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) modeling still so poor that conceptual designs are still very uncertain when converting to a model or scaled down example?
No they arent. Wtf are you even talking about. We literally just had a crash on an A350 where everybody escaped threw the exit doors before the plane burned down.
Inost crashes most people escape threw the emergency doors.
There is a question how fast is fast enough. But fast escape are incredibly important.
How many lives would that really save? We've improved airline safety to the point that there's only a single major disaster every few years. Consider how few lives extra emergency exits have actually saved in the past decade. I would guess less than 10.
If that is the price we pay for a huge range of other improvements then I think it's worth it.
What an absolute rubbish idea. That's not how it works, at all.
There are so few lives lost thanks to the stringent requirements put in place, like the mandatory 90 second evacuation rule. Remove these requirements, and it's a guarantee that the numbers will go up, sooner rather than later.
Like most of those rules, the evacuation rules were established after a very thorough analysis of previous accidents, painstakingly determining who died where, and from which cause. It is not some number pulled out of thin air that is suddenly irrelevant thanks to "technology".
The MAX saga is a very good reminder of what happens when you start playing loose with those rules. People die. Quickly, and in mass.
And, as "luck" would have it, we are not even 3 months into 2024, and we have already been served the perfect, actual, counter example to this proposal: the JAL flight, where 379 lives where saved thanks to rapid evacuation.
I'll leave a nice little article link from January here. It just happens to have the perfect headline:
https://apnews.com/article/japan-plane-fire-safety-jal-tokyo...
Well since you're against me anyway, let me double down: current airline regulations are way, way too strict in every way and are based entirely on an irrational overreaction people have to aircraft incidents because flying feels unnatural.
Increasing airline deaths to even over 1000 per year for marginally increased comfort would be worth it.
If anyone actually cared about saving lives then all focus would be on motoring, not planes. Planes should not be as safe as they are.
No, I'm not against you. I'm against an idea that is a dangerous gateway to certain death.
The current airline regulations are not way to strict. The current airline regulations are what they are to ensure, through lessons learned the hard way, that certain steps are taken to no make avoidable mistakes that have cost many lives in the past.
As for the lives lost to motoring, that's a completely unrelated problem.
It isn’t really completely unrelated though. I often drive for 6 hours between cities due to speed, comfort, and cost. I am certainly more likely to die for it.
> Increasing airline deaths to even over 1000 per year for marginally increased comfort would be worth it.
You're aware that if there are 2-6 major airline crashes per year, many people would skip flying all together, killing the industry in the process, right?
Yeah, which is unfortunate. Maybe in the distant future cultural perceptions of flying will change enough that this is no longer true.
We should apply more rules to cars. The solution clearly isnt to relax airplane regulation.
> an irrational overreaction people have to aircraft incidents because flying feels unnatural
Do you have anything to back this statement up?
Not really. I feel it's sort of self-evident if you look at how the media covers aircraft accidents and how people are afraid of flying and talk about it. I don't know how to prove it though.
If you have another theory I'd love to hear it, but I think it's pretty clear that the public overreacts to airline deaths for some reason at least.
There literally was just a plane with 400 people in it that crashed. All of them escaped threw the exits and did so safly and efficently. The plane then burned down.
So literally just in the last few month your argument is wrong.
I wonder what the math would be in saved lives due to reduced CO2 emissions vs accidents.
I feel like I see these kinds of proposed improvements to air travel (e.g. this, improved seat designs, improved volumes, etc), and yet, we're still flying in the same basic design with ever-smaller seat allocations as we have for decades. What are the chances planes like this will actually see the light of day in our lifetimes? It feels like i'm more likely to see fusion become a realistic contributor to the power grid than I am to see air travel change in any noticeable way (for the common flier at least, discounting fares like transoceanic business class).
Airplanes have changed, but in ways not immediately visible.
The Dreamliner is something like 80% composites by volume now, a material profile almost unthinkable 30 years ago.
But the visual dynamics of the design changes have been far less dramatic.
I do think we may see things change significantly with eVTOLs and battery tech improvements.
Major increases in energy density plus solid state (for safety) would probably trigger a Tesla-fication, and at that point the incumbents will inevitably be late adopters and some upstart is going to build something new looking.
Finally, if shape-memory polymers ever really take off, we could see some exciting things. Imagine a dynamically shaping airfoil, or, way out there, a wing which can translate itself from wide body to delta with almost no moving parts required to do so.
> Dreamliner is something like 80% composites by volume now, a material profile almost unthinkable 30 years ago
This—and no bleed air, fly by wire, et cetera—are big. But not on the level of air frame improvements. We’ve been stuck in a local optimum due to overconsolidation for decades now. We’re seeing it bleed into safety simply because complacence evolved into corruption.
Excellently said.
I would love to see a regulatory world where experimentation outside of the high-end is more prolific. Even the constraints that were put on UAVs by the FAA have stifled that spirit in a real way.
Where is the hacker culture in aviation that we've been amazed by in the AI space? Even people doing cool things as small groups, like the black arrow guys, are just building in the same local minima.
> Where is the hacker culture in aviation that we've been amazed by in the AI space? Even people doing cool things as small groups, like the black arrow guys, are just building in the same local minima.
Well, a basic body + wings shape, anyone with moderate skill can construct that with a kit in their garden shed and fly it.
But all these exotic design ideas? These require immense amounts of compute power to design them so that they'll actually take off and substantial investment into manufacturing tooling to manufacture them, far surpassing the capabilities of all but a very few very rich hobbyists, and people with that kind of money generally don't subject themselves to the high operational risk of general aviation. Even in cars there's no one working on home-builds for carbon composite stuff, and the potential for failures and the risk of said failures to not just the pilot but everyone on the ground there is orders of magnitude lower than with planes.
And on top of that come the regulatory issues associated with anything that flies. There are many MANY MANY orders of magnitude less people with pilot licenses in the first place, most of Europe doesn't allow flights from anything else than a licensed airstrip (although the US is different there IIRC), and new designs require an immense amount of certification paperwork, which is also the reason why it took until last year to get unleaded fuel certified (whose rollout will take at least 3-5 years).
> Where is the hacker culture in aviation that we've been amazed by in the AI space?
I mean, if you mess up your AI model, it generates photos of black Nazis or people with an extra arm. Everyone laughs at you a bit.
If you mess up your plane, it kills people. There are absolutely people building experimental aircraft, but for good reasons there's a bit more caution involved.
Planes that kill freely consenting adults would be fine. But the tricky part is that this would also exclude employees of aircraft companies since they can't be directed to fly on such a plane. If the CEO of Boeing were willing to pilot an uncertified deathtrap of their own making over the ocean that should be allowed.
But it’s ok though, because the rest of us will just pick up the bill and clean everything up when Timmy-the-cowboys-unhinged-plane falls out of the sky over a populated area, or the ocean or something. No big deal right? Fuel and emissions don’t have an environmental impact, so people can just fly whatever they please around and the rest of us should just put up with it, because god forbid we put a stumbling block for those mighty captains of industry.
"sky over a populated area" seems like you're putting words in my mouth. I explictly said that having them fly over the ocean to avoid exactly this kind of externalty.
As for the environment, well, this is a self-limiting problem. Either it was only a small aircraft or they're rich and now dead and their money can be used for cleanup.
Modern airliners are drastically more fuel-efficient than planes like the 707. Fuel efficiency is often what drives a new design. The 757 I worked on came about because of a 35% more efficient engine design. The MAX came about because (drum roll) 15% more fuel efficient engines. These make for enormous operational cost savings.
Pressurisation is better. In the 90s I would always have ear pains, which happened to me only once in the last 15 years, on an old brazilian b777.
Not sure if this is true, you can see that on any device with pressure meter (basically all 'smart' watches and phones), the standards are 2000-2500m altitude. Once you can create an altitude X inside the plane, you can do say 70% of X too.
Maybe just your condition improved?
New composite ones like A350 and Dreamliner have cabin altitude of ~1800m
Higher humidity too.
I don't know. My bottles of water aren't completely flatten when we land, something that I remember was always the case. Keeping in mind flying in the 90s means taking planes manufactured in the 70s and 80s (including a Caravelle!).
And yet Boeing has yet to backport all that fancy carbon fiber and stuff to their bread and butter 737…
Just because a 737 is used for shorter flights doesn’t mean people wouldn’t want higher air pressure, higher humidity, larger windows, quieter cabins, etc…
So disappointing they keep cranking out the current 737 lineage.
> we're still flying in the same basic design with ever-smaller seat allocations as we have for decades
We have a rent-seeking duopoly of airframe designers. The history of commercial air frames ended in the era of the Concorde.
What we need is competition, and national leadership willing to bet on it.
The airframe designers don't decide the seat space per passenger.
They can include all of the spacious reclining seats and lounge sofas as they want in the design, and airlines will spec it with seats and seat pitches that produce the greatest profit per flight by maximizing the number of passengers within the limits of safety regulations.
> airframe designers don't decide the seat space per passenger
Sure? Seats aren't part of an airframe.
No, aircraft frames are the way they are because they balance the billion different requirements the best. A blended wing body is nothing new.
> aircraft frames are the way they are because they balance the billion different requirements the best. A blended wing body is nothing new
One big one being the fixed cost of new air frame development and certification. Nobody would incur that expense unless forced to by the competition.
And yet new airframes do get certified.
> yet new airframes do get certified
Last one was the 737 Max in 2017. It’s a derivative. The last truly new frames were the 787 in 2011 and A380 in 2006. Both focussed on subsystems, propulsion and materials for their novelty; only one has been a commercial success.
One successful (two attempted) new airframes in over two decades is extraordinarily slower than the pre-consolidation frequency. It is also notable that neither attempted to introduce a new air frame that directly competes with the other’s; Airbus and Boeing trade market segments. There is zero head-to-head competition.
Modern planes are a marvel of engineering. And newer planes are more comfortable. That doesn’t change that we’re stuck in a local optimum due to a cessation of risk taking.
The A350, a clean sheet composite design, was certified in 2014.
You’re right. The A220 and A350 were clean sheets introduced in the 2010s.
There's been more competition in the regional market including clean sheet designs by new entrants, but they're all conventional tubes and wings and podded turbofans too. China's state funded A320/737 competitor is a clone with a shared engine platform too.
Improving on current generation airliners is hard compared with improving what flew between 1920 and 1950, and consolidation happened because it wasn't profitable. Airlines and financiers don't like uncertainty either.
A220 in 2015 I think was also clean sheet.
Why do you keep thinking competition is what prevented blended wing bodies? Blended wing bodies make big trade offs that don't neatly fit with commercial flight.
The analysis of different lifting bodies is fairly fundamental aeronautical engineering work every student learns. There is no weird conspiracy here.
> Why do you keep thinking competition is what prevented blended wing bodies?
Never said as much. OP asked why all planes since the 70s look about the same. It’s because there isn’t a sustained budget for experimentation.
> no weird conspiracy
Never said as much. It’s not exactly groundbreaking for entrenched supplies to cease innovating and focus on extraction.
> OP asked why all planes since the 70s look about the same.
All commercial passenger airliners (and there are some exceptions there, but in different directions than blended-wing-body) look about the same, but not all airplanes do.
> It’s because there isn’t a sustained budget for experimentation.
No, its because there are various technical challenges with blended wing-body aircraft that have to be balanced against the reduced drag and resulting better fuel efficiency, such as structural challenges if you want continuous internal cabin space; access if you want to be able to evacuate them as efficiently as a tubular fuselage aircraft, etc. Some of those have had progress over the years (e.g., the structural ones) as material science has advanced.
There are blended-wing-body designs (or the related but more extreme flying wing design) that have been produced, mostly as experimental or military aircraft (several US strategic bombers have been blended-wing-body or flying wing designs: the B-1 is a blended-wing-body (also with variable sweep wings), B-2 and B-21 are flying wing designs.)
> Never said as much. OP asked why all planes since the 70s look about the same. It’s because there isn’t a sustained budget for experimentation.
Bullshit. There is tons of money for innovation, every single manufacturer is trying to squeeze 1-2% efficient improvements across the board. To say there is no funding for innovation is hilariously ignorant.
> Never said as much. It’s not exactly groundbreaking for entrenched supplies to cease innovating and focus on extraction.
Cool, can you show me what numbers you're looking at that even hint that these blended wing bodies are better than contemporary commercial designs?
> Cool, can you show me what numbers you’re looking at that even hint that these blended wing bodies are better than contemporary commercial designs?
Department of the Air Force Climate Action Plan, October 2022 [0] (p17) “For example, development of blended wing body aircraft could drive transformative changes, as this aircraft design increases aerodynamic efficiency by at least 30 percent over current Air Force tanker and mobility aircraft” [Note that Air Force tanker and mobility aircraft are similar to, and in some cases simply militarized versions of, commercial airliner or air transport designs.]
The same report (p19) identifies development and testing of a full-scale blended wing prototype by FY27 as a Key Result of the Action Plan.
[0] https://www.safie.hq.af.mil/Portals/78/documents/Climate/DAF... [PDF]
> Bullshit. There is tons of money for innovation
I heard almost the same out of a Lockheed executive about launch about a decade and a half ago. A dollar of R&D can travel differently at a cushy corporation than at one in competition.
> can you show me what numbers you're looking at that even hint that these blended wing bodies are better
No, I have never defended this design—I have no specs. A better question is why you’re so convinced this optimum is the global one.
Both of you are correct - there is a duopoly because of the complexity, and the duopoly has no real incentive to change, given that the current local optimum seems to be working for the foreseeable future. There is no pressure to innovate, and a strong one to keep the status quo.
And yet efficiency gains are vigorously pursued and adopted, where real - and most recently, that has been with engines and composites. Meanwhile, the blended-wing concept has been experimented with for over a century, and it has never demonstrated a compelling improvement. Until I see a proposal that comes with a paper explaining what recent innovation has made things different this time, I will remain skeptical.
I am sceptical, too. There are no efficiency numbers on their website, just marketing boilerplate.
In terms of pure frontal area, their design looks fatter.
Would be interesting to see some drag data from wind tunnel tests.
National? Which nation?
This is a multifaceted issue, involving the duopoly of commercial airline manufacturers, strict regulation, and massive subsidies.
It costs Boeing 10s of billions of dollars and usually around a decade to design an aircraft from a clean sheet, with very little incentive for truly disruptive innovation. Developing and testing a wholly new design like this would probably take double the time and more than double the cost. When your assembly, all testing, designs, control systems, and pilots have been optimized "wings on a tube" shape for 70+ years, I'd imagine it's difficult to pivot the core design that drastically.
I'm hoping to see some of the government subsidies shifted towards more competition with Boeing's recent failures, but lobbying is powerful, so we'll see.
I don’t think you’re likely to see a significant change to the flying experience (at least not for the better) as long as most customers continue to prefer the cheapest, most terrible option.
Maybe somebody succeeds with a delta-wing design, but the highest-profit configuration will still be to make the seats as cheap and terrible as possible.
There is a demand for more luxurious aircraft travel, but at the moment it's too costly to provide.
If BWBs become a thing, maybe the value of cabin space will decrease to the point where paying for a business class - or even premium economy - seat for long-haul travel is attractive for more people.
I did some Googling and apparently the base price ratio for business class to economy class is about 3.6 to 1. Some of that is all the other frippery - lounge access, priority baggage, better food, more personal service etc. etc. So at a rough guess providing just the bigger seat would attract a premium of maybe 3x economy class.
At the moment, New York-London with United is about $600 and business maybe $1800-$2000 (so perhaps a little bit under the expected premium, but in the ballpark). For most people, an extra $1400 is a big ask.
But imagine a world where the economy flight is $200 and business class $700. I suspect a lot more people would choose business class in those circumstances.
Some of the people who currently fly economy would start flying business, but a huge number of people who are currently taking Greyhound buses, driving, or choosing not to travel at all, would start flying economy.
I agree. I am disappointed that NASA abdigated its role in driving forward not only space but aviation to commercial interests. It made, and still makes, many people very rich, but profit motives lead to the masses to feeling, and being handled, like cattle.
I'm particularly frustrated by the dearth of general aviation as a means of travel outside of the wealthy. We built small airports EVERYWHERE, and in most cases they sit rotting in rural areas instead of being hubs of inter-city trade.
I have plans to change that, but the aviation space is notoriously coin-operated and high impedance. Even with funding it's going to require some serious SV-style hacking to change anything meaningfully.
Blended wing body jets have a number of disadvantages:
* Low ratio of window seats may not be acceptable to passengers
* Passengers seated at the edges will experience greater positive and negative g-forces when rolling
* Don't fit well into existing airports for parking, jet bridges, etc.
* More difficult to design for pressurization than a tube
This specific model of BWB, when overlayed with a 737/A320 seems to put the outer-most passengers at the approximate location of the nacelles on the narrow-body aircraft.
The nacelles on a 737 are BARELY wider than an A380. Is differential force an issue on the A380? It is one of the only models of commercial aircraft I have never flown on.
> * Low ratio of window seats may not be acceptable to passengers
Is that really a problem though? A lot of window passengers seem to close the window almost as soon as they get in their seat.
Sure isn't a problem on long-haul where the windows stay shut the whole time.
I am a window seat fan not because I can look out the window (although I generally do on ascent/descent) but because when I pass out in economy I don't end up resting my head on my seat mate's shoulder :)
To me the allure of the window seat has less to do with the window and more to do with what the window implies. I.e. it could just as well be called "the wall seat" and I'd get 95% the utility out of it.
Wasn't there some concept in airplane interior design to put displays in the walls so you could virtually display the outside like the aircraft wasn't even there?
Never really thought about how being far from the centerline would change how much/quickly you move in a roll, I can definitely see that feeling being unnerving, expecially the inevetable(though rare?) negative G moments.
Put a price on carbon and there might be suddenly some space for more innovation in airliners.
Right now it makes sense to fly old planes even when they're less efficient since fuel is cheap.
Any evidence for this?
Airliners have steadily gotten more fuel efficient at a rate of about 1.3% per year since the 1960s, driven by fierce competition.
If someone could produce a massively more efficient design then there’d be huge interest but when the risk of failure is so high, why would manufacturers take a chance instead of iterating on what is already proven?
In undergrad we had an alumni, who had climbed the ranks at Bombardier, come and talk about aircraft and engine evolution. They are 100% trying to make them as cost-effective as possible and fuel economy is a huge driver for that.
The challenge is that not only is there a huge upfront investment into a new unconventional airframe, with the associated risk of failure that you point out, but if you are successful you're now going to be completely retooling and retraining everyone since no one has experience mass producing airframes like this. For that kind of investment... you'd better have a pretty damned good cost or efficiency argument.
Apparently a 747 has a cruise L/D of around 17 and an A340 is around 19. The U-2 is up around 25. There's not a whole room left between what we've got now and gliders as far as L/D goes, so the only place really left to try to improve is the engines themselves... and modern high-bypass turbofans are really marvels of squeezing as much energy as you can out of a (relatively) lightweight piece of machinery. We build the hot bits in those engines out of, literally, magical single crystals of crazy alloys to be able run them as hot as possible to maximize their efficiency.
Just as an example, a lot of companies are using jets on short haul flights where a turboprop would be a lot more fuel efficient. On short trips the speed difference doesn't mean much.
Again, there's some complex calculation about training, fleet diversity, flights per airframe per day etc.
If fuel is cheap, it makes sense to use the more fuel gulping plane because other costs are better. If fuel is expensive, maybe it then makes more sense to use more turboprops even though it means other complications.
Turbofan engine compression ratio and bypass ratio have been increased but we are nowhere near the limits of total aircraft efficiency.
Just as an example, Perlan II glider has glide ratio of 43. Of course, it's for a totally different use case and useless directly as an airline. But as comparison the most efficient airliner, the ATR turboprop has glide ratio of about 15.
Fuel prices are just one factor. Airlines prefer underwing engines for ease of maintenance. Mechanics can reach everything with a simple ladder.
Hm, haven't we seen this before? Yes, we did:
2019: https://www.flightglobal.com/programmes/flying-v-concept-rec...
2020: https://www.businessinsider.com/klm-royal-dutch-airlines-fut...
A prototype of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines' futuristic-looking flying-wing aircraft just took its first flight in Germany — take a look at the Flying-V
That one was closer to a V-shape while this contender fills up the space between the V's legs with more seating.
May the best one win...
Company that was trying this design for a kit built GA BWB.
http://www.wingco.com/index.html
Looking at the site, this is 20 years ago now since the last update, a taxi test accident appears to have ended the project.
Is there anything more then nice renders? Like a model that works or something?
https://aviationweek.com/aerospace/emerging-technologies/faa...
Cool:
JetZero’s four-year development plan is due to culminate in flight tests of the full-scale demonstrator beginning in the first quarter of 2027. Sized around the capacity of a Boeing 767 with a wingspan close to that of an Airbus A330, the demonstrator will be built and tested in collaboration with Northrop Grumman and its prototyping subsidiary Scaled Composites.
It's an ambitious plan though, given that they have only just been granted licenses for their 1:8 scale model.
How hard is it to get clearance from the FAA to fly a large drone? This seems to indicate they are very very early in the development process.
I like how they suggest the new body design will lead to improved comfort and space for passengers.
Absolutely no way -- they'll find a way to fill it as tight as possible.
Depends on the airline.
RyanAir would.
Air Emirates would figure out how to cram a discotech into the back.
Related:
JetZero's ultra-efficient blended wing demonstrator cleared for takeoff
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/jetzero-blended-wing-demonstra...
Totally random but why does this website need a cookie pop up? What would a Jet company need with my cross domain browsing data?
Because otherwise they would have to make sure they don’t need a cookie popup, and nobody is ever sure of that with modern marketing stacks
THIS! I put cookie popups on basically all my sites just to avoid having to screw with figuring out what minor analytics cookie might break some law somewhere.
> THIS! I put cookie popups on basically all my sites just to avoid having to screw with figuring out what minor analytics cookie might break some law somewhere.
Lazy question, but have any new products popped up in the past few years with guarantees around that question because of the apparent new market opportunities for compliant (read: less invasive / non invasive) site analytics software?
Well, they want to see what other jets you are buying and give you a good deal on in-flight entertainment, or free fuel for 2 cross Atlantic trips if you buy their jet.
They're using Hubspot as their CRM and all the tracking that comes with that.
They also use Google Fonts, which Google says is not used for tracking, but the EU disagrees.
At this point, it is probably just good practice to have it on every site. I imagine it is a default in every template now.
Good practice for whom?
Every website owner, that doesn't want to get shit on because they forgot to notify you they're dropping a cookie because they use google analytics or something else to monitor their site data.
How about stop dropping tracking cookies? Much easier.
Anyone who has a website. It is zero downside butt coverage.
The people who make the rules?
also the site is "protected" by dmca.com
Probably the same analytics/funnel bs that's everywhere these days. Though in this case the users are probably vcs not buyers.
Haha, nice timing that this appears after the "why are airplanes so hard to build?" article! Putting the engines to radiate sound upwards does make a lot of sense.
I was intrigued, but acoustically it doesn’t make a lot of sense really…the thrust exhaust where all the fast moving air comes out, also happens to be where all the loud comes out too. Their renderings don’t look like the engines are far enough forward for the fuselage to provide any significant obstructions to the path of sound from the exhaust down to the ground.
I think that is what Nasa's X-59 plane that is doing to eliminate/minimize the sonic boom too. Pushing the boom upwards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jAH-51feAA (Cleo Abram - NASA Is Bringing Supersonic Planes BACK)
We don't put engines on top because it makes maintenance alot harder.
There's also the issue of ingesting the turbulent/detached boundary layer of the fuselage at high angles of attack, causing inlet distortions and the corresponding risk of compressor stall.
Also safety. Uncontained engine failures shouldn’t ever happen (and maybe happen less as technology gets better), but when they do happen, it’s better for them to be under the wing away from the fuselage rather than right in the path of critical control systems.
Since this is a blended wing with no vertical stabilizer, it might be different, but it does still look like there are control surfaces right next to the engines..
> it’s better for them to be under the wing away from the fuselage rather than right in the path of critical control systems
but.... all the control surfaces are on the wing right next to that engine.
Ailerons and flaps are, but elevators and rudder that control the yaw and pitch of an aircraft are in the tail. See United Flight 232.
Link? Search can’t find it.
What I will say, is their board of advisors is impressive - https://www.jetzero.aero/company
And they have many roles open.
To me this seems like it has a decent shot. I do wonder if they should focus on one category (e.g. tanker) or something that’ll get it off the ground.
Not just the board. Their CTO came up with the idea (with two other legendary greybeards) years before most of us were sucking air. Mark's been at the heart of the LA aerospace scene for quite a while, is as intelligent as he is humble, and I'm genuinely happy that he's finally going to get an honest crack at this.
Wow I didn't scroll down far enough.
The gang is back together (Liebeck and Rawdon) and they even threw in Kroo for good measure. This has all the heavy hitters gathered under the same roof.
Maybe, and I'd love to see aviation innovation (ahem) take off, but...
https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-former-board-member...
I'd be careful how much I take from just a fancy list of board members.
It's different:
Holmes' board going into the scandal included an unusual roster of names for a healthcare startup, with leaders who had more experience in politics and government than healthcare
OTOH, JetZero's board include former executives of:
Airbus
Learjet
Gulfstream
AirFrance KLM
Pratt & Whitney
Major aircraft and jet engine makers as well as airlines. In other words, very strong industry knowledge and connections.
Are those windows on top of the plane? Would seeing the empty sky above you be a good thing for passengers?
They are called skylights in buildings, I have to imagine being able to let in more natural light into the cabin, especially in a plane with such a wide body and corresponding distance between side windows is a generally good thing for humans.
I always thought you didn't want to do this because of UV exposure and heat reasons...
Plus occasionally the sun will shine straight into someone's head.
If only someone would invent electrochromic windows...
or manual pull shades.
this happens in regular aircraft all the time.
Both are blocked with any decent coating to block UV and IR
Surprisingly so! Humans really don't like being confined, and travel is stressful enough as it is...
One of the options for my senior design project (~5 years ago) was designing an artificial skylight for a hyperloop-style vehicle. Evacuated tubes make natural lighting difficult, and they'd already determined this was going to be a major hurdle for making the thing an attractive option for passenger transit. They wanted it to respond to the vehicles movements as well. Cool project!
> Would seeing the empty sky above you be a good thing for passengers?
I would imagine seeing the ground above you to be much worse for passengers...
Maybe a looping from times to times would reduce the fear of space above the passengers.
And it would make those warnings about your baggage maybe having moved in flight much more notable.
A proper loop will maintain constant positive G's. Wouldn't anticipate too much shifting. You wouldn't even need your seatbelt.
Although I can say from experience, walking around at 1.5 G is uncomfortable, 2 G is downright tricky.
...until all those people, who don't wear seatbelts while seated, end up falling to the ceiling and then falling to the floor.
Anything not held down - imagine all the laptops and electronic gear - flying around the cabin...
Except for the sociopath in B3 who gets off on all the screaming...
Definitely want them closed on long-hauls, but would be nice for light on domestic flights... Could also wear eye covers I guess.
The 1930 outline looks like a DC-3. Can someone name the others? I'm especially curious about 1949.
1940 looks like a Boeing model 377
1949 is the de Havilland Comet
1960 looks like a DC-8 (engines are closer together than a 707)
1974 is probably an A300
I think you nailed it. Thanks!
What this means to me, if not vaporware, is that either ticket prices will go down for the same space or I'll get much more room and not be so crammed into the seat. Maybe we can ride with more comfort, and have more standing moving room, like a train.
The job salaries aren’t competitive enough, and not matching the experience of years required AND the skills listed.. a front end programmer can easily make the same while working remotely and probably working another 2 jobs too.
The seating mockup feels uncomfortable to me as the rows angle towards one another. It's ok to face a stranger for a short train ride, but on a long flight I'd feel less comfortable.
My understanding that the difficult part of these blended wing concepts is the uneven volume of the aircraft makes pressurization difficult.
It's the Arkbird from Ace Combat
Side windows only for business class. How to make economy even more miserable.
> Side windows only for business class
I’m currently in a lay-flat seat home from Europe. Center aisles. Nobody at the windows ever opened them.
In Economy (not lay-flat) the best feature of having a window is about having a wall next to you for sleeping, not for sight-seeing.
On recent flights, I was surprised how many people who somehow chose a window seat, closed the window, during broad daylight. This is a big change from when I was younger, where so many more people had the window open and were interested in seeing what was outside. I wonder what changed? Is it phones? Is it sleep debt? Is it that they have flown 100 times now and the novelty is gone?
I always love listening to music and looking out the window.
The benefit of a window seat is not that you can look out (although it is fun on occasion). The biggest benefit (for me) is you don't have a stranger next to you on that side. You have a wall you can sleep against. This is a godsend on 10hr flights.
For me its usually I am tired and yeah, the novelty is gone, I flew for work for a number of years and had parents who were always sending me back home to the old country as a kid, it's been a long time since I have enjoyed flying.
Airlines have been charging extra for window seats for years.
sunroof windows coming soon.
That would be really nice!
The best will be when the double decker economy seats start to be installed. /s
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How much more expensive would this shape be to build?
How can anyone take this site seriously? It looks looks some stock Joomla nonsense from 2008 with a few cheap CG mock-ups of a jet that look amateurish at best. Not a god look for a company claiming to disrupt the jet space.
Not sure if you've noticed, but all websites are like this now. Heck, we don't even have side layouts. It's all optimized for mobile now.
They do have a video, fwiw, from the CEO.
https://www.jetzero.aero/
They're engineers. Not fashion designers.
I mean at this point anythings better than fucking boeing.
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This isn't Reddit.