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".
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.
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, 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.