JetZero: Ultra-efficient blended wing body jet
jetzero.aero
jetzero.aero
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.
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.
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)
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.
Whether the fuel economy of an airliner-sized tanker is enough to convince doubting airline execs facing very different operational constraints is another question.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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... .
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".
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...
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.
With half of all emergency exits (assuming that something like a fire could be blocking the rest, which has already happened).
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.
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?
Inost crashes most people escape threw the emergency doors.
There is a question how fast is fast enough. But fast escape are incredibly important.
If that is the price we pay for a huge range of other improvements then I think it's worth it.
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...
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.
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?
Do you have anything to back this statement up?
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.
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.
So literally just in the last few month your argument is wrong.
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.
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.
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 analysis of different lifting bodies is fairly fundamental aeronautical engineering work every student learns. There is no weird conspiracy here.
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.
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?
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.
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]
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.)
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.
In terms of pure frontal area, their design looks fatter.
Would be interesting to see some drag data from wind tunnel tests.
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.
Sure? Seats aren't part of an airframe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Maybe just your condition improved?
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
* 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
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.
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.
Right now it makes sense to fly old planes even when they're less efficient since fuel is cheap.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Absolutely no way -- they'll find a way to fill it as tight as possible.
RyanAir would.
Air Emirates would figure out how to cram a discotech into the back.
JetZero's ultra-efficient blended wing demonstrator cleared for takeoff
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/jetzero-blended-wing-demonstra...
They also use Google Fonts, which Google says is not used for tracking, but the EU disagrees.
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?
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..
but.... all the control surfaces are on the wing right next to that engine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jAH-51feAA (Cleo Abram - NASA Is Bringing Supersonic Planes BACK)
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.
https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-former-board-member...
I'd be careful how much I take from just a fancy list of board members.
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.
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.
I would imagine seeing the ground above you to be much worse for passengers...
Although I can say from experience, walking around at 1.5 G is uncomfortable, 2 G is downright tricky.
Anything not held down - imagine all the laptops and electronic gear - flying around the cabin...
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!
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’m currently in a lay-flat seat home from Europe. Center aisles. Nobody at the windows ever opened them.
I always love listening to music and looking out the window.