Bonkers tri-wing jumbo jet concept reduces fuel consumption by 70%
robbreport.com
robbreport.com
Highly unlikely to be real.
If this concept had legs I would expect it to have been already gobbled up by one of the major aircraft manufacturers even while the company was in 'stealth mode'.
Not only it's supposed to be 70% more efficient, but it is supposed to be easier to construct. On another article(https://paxex.aero/se-aeronautics-fever-dream/) they are saying they have a "new construction technique" that can build a whole airframe in a week. New, unproven construction technique could be revolutionary in itself - and an uphill certification battle.
Oh and also the engines will be swappable in 30 minutes. And it's so efficient that even though it has two engines, only one will be in use at a time in cruise. So this means they will be close together. This is a safety concern.
Its economy class will be more comfortable than today's economy class too (how can you claim that, that's entirely up to the airlines, unless they won't offer other seating arrangements)
Lots of outlandish claims. Sure, the airline industry has only made very incremental developments over the past few decades and is overly conservative. Probably ripe for disruption. But to claim that you can suddenly leapfrog them on cost, efficiency, construction time and other verticals AT THE SAME TIME... sounds like snake oil to me.
This really makes me wonder how much of the lack of innovation in recent years is regulatory capture.
> If this concept had legs I would expect it to have been already gobbled up by one of the major aircraft manufacturers even while the company was in 'stealth mode'.
The Fermi paradox[0] of innovation. Surly it's possible this is feasible but the incumbent powers are not incentivized to adopt for other reasons.
> But to claim that you can suddenly leapfrog them on cost, efficiency, construction time and other verticals AT THE SAME TIME... sounds like snake oil to me.
Totally. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.
All that said I really hope we can innovate on this front. 70% fuel savings is an insane amount of pollution we can prevent, among other benefits.
A relatively large amount.
For instance, general aviation use of lead-based fuels. The lead content has been reduced, but building new engines (and certifying them) is not economical. Very few people actually _like_ 100LL fuel.
Regardless, such engines have been built. But then you need to certify aircraft equipped with such engines too.
However, there are plenty of aircraft in the "experimental" category that will gladly take "MoGAS" (aka automotive gasoline). Pilots also like it because it's cheaper and there's no spark plug fouling. Some may be concerned with the environment too.
Avionics on the experimental category are arguably better.
I'm torn on this issue, because regulation saves countless lives and we don't even notice. We do notice when they don't regulate enough (for instance, let companies like Boeing self-regulate) and we get crashes as a result.
That's exactly it.
Not only you have to ensure that any catastrophic failures will be contained, but also that they will not impact either the remaining engine and any fuel, hydraulic or control lines that are feeding that engine. This is easier to prove and certify when the engines are on opposite sides of the fuselage.
I don’t see much in the way of material differences here.
Anyone can throw together a 3D rendering of a jet with extra wings and make all sorts of claims about its performance.
By the time you stack up the evolutionary stuff - which is going to happen anyway - the revolutionary part isn't that big a deal. And by the time they overcome the challenges of doing a real design, the industry has evolved and the revolutionary concept fades away.
More to the point, no evidence is presented of any credentials to do an actual design, and two years ago they were launching a revolutionary seat
Seems not as the first image either has the wings/wing tips on upside down or is missing the upward facing winglets. I've seen aircraft with upward, both down- and up-ward, but never just downward facing winglets.
https://calaero.edu/guide-airplane-winglets/
This sort of engine arrangement seems likely to suffer with centre of gravity problems? The side scoops feed the rear engine so the top engine could be occluded by the fuselage?
Until they have a real working prototype this isn't that interesting. It seems like they're trying to drum up interest to get funding.
I'd feel uncomfortable knowing 200k liters of jet fuel are stored above me, no matter how many layers of (self healing) bladders are protecting it.
Irrational, I know.
> The pilots attempted to use the cockpit escape rope to climb to the ground, but the first officer was knocked off the rope when the number 2 engine and right wing fuel tanks exploded, triggering a large fireball that consumed much of the fuselage. The captain subsequently leapt from the window without using the rope.
Now, would I prefer to have the fuel above me or below me? Probably above. But in the wings away from the cabin does seem a bit safer.
Seriously, as someone who is not an aerospace designer guy, I would have thought that the turbulence thrown off the front wing would cause problems for the back two (or at least cause them to look radically different).
It's like the flying version of a Tyrrell P34.
That is true if it had an actual reduction in total fuel spend over the journey.
This promises a ~70% reduction in rate, which is not the same thing as 70% reduction over distance, unless someone says at the same speed.
For instance, the double-bubble Aurora D8 did get 70% more efficiency out of the aerodynamics but also by cutting the cruise speed from 0.8 mach to 0.72 to make the aero work.
So more efficient per hour, but longer hours of flight which introduces additional spend.
The SUGAR FREEZE did something similar with extra wings under the main wings like a bi-plane, but again with big savings at mach 0.7 and only 10% at mach 0.8. But of course, the real cost shift there was switching the fuel type to something that can be manufactured out of co2+h20 (like pure methane).
Reducing fuel usage to that extent based on wing and airframe shape alone seems rather ridiculous.
First, having the fuel in the wings is the most obvious choice, it stabilizes the plane and reduces strain on the wing spar. It makes the choice of 3 short wings instead of a single, longer one, and yet, as seen on gliders, longer wings are generally more efficient. It is probably necessary in order to make them thin (which is good) and strong enough to support, among other things, the fuel that isn't in the wings. And having the wings one behind the other doesn't look great for aerodynamics, I can easily imagine the wingtip vortex of the front wing hitting the back wing on the way down.
It looks like the kind of thing that can do well in a simulation with very well defined parameters but I don't expect it to pass the real world test (or even just a wind tunnel).
However the proposed plane has 3 wings, which, naively, would have the same drag as a wing 3 times longer.
Non-naively, it goes beyond my knowledge of aerodynamics, but it is worth noting that multi-wing designs were very popular pre-WW2 but they are almost never seen today, which suggests a design compromise made obsolete by modern technologies.
Lift ~ surface area of wing * velocity^2 https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/lifteq.html
At slow speeds, you need a lot of surface area. As speed increases, the required surface area decreases rapidly.
Remember the first flight was made on what is basically the power of a modern lawnmower and so was quite slow and required massive wings which created all sorts of stiffness problems. The wings could tear off the plane in a sharp turn or even a gust of wind. Imagine a plywood skeleton covered in canvas held together by suspension wires.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bl%C3%A9riot_XI
Thus the idea of cutting the wings in half and stacking them atop each other as biplanes or even triplanes in order to make them stiffer while maintaining a high surface area to generate the required lift at the slow speeds of the day. The stiffer wings also allowed for sharper turns, but suffered from more drag. But at those slow speeds, drag was not so much of an issue as it also goes with the square of velocity.
That meant that biplanes had a big advantage in terms of maneuverability and stability and so outperformed the fragile, slow turning monoplanes in WW1 dogfights. But over time, improvements in engine technology allowed for much higher horsepower -- we went from 40hp engines to 1000hp engines in two decades. That increase in power allowed for increased speeds and reduced the need for wing surface area, and with the increased speed, drag became more of a concern, at which point biplanes were at a disadvantage.
But during that transition period in the 20s and 30s, when early monoplanes were introduced and competed with biplanes they would still tend to stall and were not nearly as maneuverable. New materials -- corrugated iron -- were introduced to help stiffen the wings but even then the pilots of the era hated flying these "iron planes" compared to the more nimble wooden biplanes. WW2, of course, changed everything with monster engines and shockingly fast planes, leaving biplanes for the world of hobby flight and acrobatic exhibitions.
So the 70% reduced fuel consumption has not been tested with a built plane on a real flight. Got it.
Call me a cynic, but I've seen innovative new designs for commercial planes since I was a kid, yet here we are nearly 25 years later flying planes that look like they're from the 1950s.
That said, making a habit of flying people and things across long distances seems kind of wasteful and inefficient, and if we do stick around I'd expect us to be making the kinds of decisions that would lead to us doing less of it. But I think we will have aircraft as long as we have industrialized society.
If the latter, we don't need to spend billions on R&D for more efficient designs. We just devote the same comparatively few bucks spent on GPT3 and other ML models to inventing a new, more efficient airplane design.
If we did, maybe an improvement like the one in this linked article is bonkers. If so, we could invest in other assets.
As an example, take the longitudinal fuel bladder in this design. I don’t know how you design a version of that that isn’t subject to very scary longitudinal sloshing and doesn’t have unprecedentedly complex plumbing that will be very, very, very expensive and risky to validate for normal flight operations, let alone emergencies. And that’s, like, the most obvious problem with it, and I’m not even counting all the normal, mundane airplane problems the incumbents have already spent millions of man-hours solving.
By the way, I know someone who just inherited a few million dollars and is looking for someone to create an account for her to transfer the money to.
This is bonkers. Sorry for the really snarky remark.
The 1950s?! The DC-8's design has been around for at least 75 million years!
Commercial aircraft rarely continue in passenger service beyond 25 years, never mind 65, and the maintenance requirements as well as the fuel bill means it doesn't make financial sense to try.
Edit: A google image search for '1950s airplanes' shows me very weird-looking planes that don't much resemble what we have today, in my experience. I now disagree with OP too, I don't think there has been nearly as much stagnation in airplane design and flight over the last 70 years as is indicated in these comments.
New 737's may have more composites and more modern manufacturing techniques but it's not any radical departure.
For General Aviation, there are tens of thousands of planes from the 50's and 60's still around and the engines they use (Lycoming/Continental) are still based on designs from the 50s with modernized metallurgy, valves and fuel injection.
Incidentally, aero engine makers were playing around with direct injection, electrically controlled turbo waste gates and turbo-compounding at the beginning of WWII.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/751440/aviation-industry...
https://thepointsguy.com/news/airlines-oldest-fleets/
There are _plenty_ being used as freighters. Take the DC-3. First flight in 1935. Produced until 1942 (1950 in the URSS). Still in operation.
However, the 737 design is from 1968. Is that better?
In general aviation, there are lots of planes flying from that time. In flight schools you'll see a bunch of Cessna 150s, first flight in 1957. Thousands of aircraft still operational from that era, even some from the WW2 era (Ercoupe)
In the military, we have the B-52. From 1955. It was only produced from 1952 to 1962. Expected retirement is sometime in 2050, maybe later. That's a full century of service.
Planes are expensive. They are expected to be in service for many decades. Maintenance keeps them working almost indefinitely (even more so if they are not pressurized).
Airlines will only retire them when there are other, more economically viable, options(which sometimes includes new models of essentially the same airframe).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/751440/aviation-industry...
I'd be curious what you found. The Boeing 707 first flew in 1957, and it uses essentially the same configuration as airliners today (with some evolutionary improvements).
Current requirements are pegged at 400 Wh/kg, while current batteries are between 250-280. A major efficiency improvement should put us much closer.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Caproni_...
at 0.9mach wing will be in the low pressure/high turbolence area of the wing ahead, especially with how low swept these are. at least the third one is off axes, but still.
also, these are the same guy of the huge ass v shaped thing.
how long has to pass before we can call them the theranos of aviation?
lol
We don't actually know if the final build would even function. This is just a design discussion.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/se-aeronautics-to-m...
EDIT: Maybe toothpaste squeezer design could work.
https://mk0saferacklivebim3l.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...
There's no evidence of an actual company with actual engineers working on this, and a fair few hints to the contrary if you look at their website.
- vertically-stacked wings (biplanes, triplanes) are common, but I've never seen 3 non-stacked wings. Not even the Nazis were doing that, which is a red flag for this project actually.
(I think it was France that passed a law that airplanes required at least 2 stacked wings around WW1, as monoplanes had too many structural failures at the time.)
- more wings mean more lift, but also more drag
- one advantage of more wings is that airports support only certain wing spans, so winglets or more wings is a work-around for that. (The result of winglets is mainly to effectively lengthen wing span.)
- very thin wings aid in penetrating the sound barier. This is a subsonic plane in terms of speed, but more accurately it's a transsonic plane (mixed subsonic and supersonic) over certain parts.
- I don't see the second engine, but if it has two, that's adequate for most oceanic operations because other small jets are allowed to do that, and ETOPS. (If ETOPS regulations apply, then engine reliability history is examined.)
- If the engines are too close together, then an uncontained engine explosion can destroy the other. This is fairly common for engines mounted near each other.)
Anyways it looks like this company is generally considered to be a scam so I don't think this is much more than a 3D render.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a11987/for-transocea...
ETOPS-N: N number of minutes over open water, roughly, I think.
Two-engine airliners are overwhelmingly the most common configuration today, including for ocean crossings. (I can't tell if you're arguing that 2 is 50% less than 4 and implying that 4 is the standard for water-crossing, or if you think it's a single-engine jet.)
Better range than a 787 or A350.
Not really my discipline. I don't know how long a twin engine plane is expected to be able to fly on one engine, or under what sort of envelope.
https://robbreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Se200.jpg
(Although this view seems to have "only" 2 wings for reasons I don't understand.)