MIT Designs Aircraft That Uses 70% Less Fuel Than Conventional Planes 459
greenrainbow writes "Today a team of researchers at MIT unveiled their design for an airplane that uses 70% less fuel than conventional aircraft. The MIT design comes thanks to a NASA-funded initiative to increase fuel efficiency, lower emissions, and allow planes to take off on shorter runways. The team accomplished all of NASA's set goals with their innovative D-series plane, lovingly referred to as the 'double bubble,' which has thinner, longer wings and a smaller tail, and engine placement at the rear of the plane instead of on the wings."
Intrigued to know more (Score:3, Insightful)
How to pressurize it? (Score:3, Insightful)
A non-cylindrical cabin would be significantly heavier than a cylindrical cabin, if the plane is meant to fly at the same altitude as current planes.
Re:Intrigued to know more (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, when the airlines get these, there will be a "green" fee, a "designed by MIT" fee and an "environmental feel good" fee added onto your ticket price along with all the junk fees.
Re:Questions (Score:3, Insightful)
By 2035 it's almost certain those will be carbon-fiber aircraft.
The fuel will be somewhere in the fuselage, possibly in the seat cushions (oh don't roll your eyes like that would make flying any more dangerous).
Moving the moment of inertia in will make the aircraft less stable about its forward axis, but computer flight algorithms will keep it from wobbling too much.
Re:Slower than current aircraft (Score:3, Insightful)
If your flight from new york to LA took an extra half hour and cost 30% less, i don't think anybody would complain
For scheduling reasons, moving the same amount of cattle will now take something like 8% more aircraft. That means that several internal empires will need to expand by at least 8%, in some cases much more. Hourly crew costs and massive management overhead always scales super-linearly. Financing costs for 8% more planes on less revenue will demand a higher interest rate, so financial costs will increase super-linearly.
If an airline did the "slowdown" thing for marketing to "save the planet" they're going to have to increase ticket costs at least 10% merely to break even financially.
You lost me at 2035 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Intrigued to know more (Score:2, Insightful)
And then there's the fee for adding on the fees...
Nah, that's already been patented by Ticketmaster.
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Or a larger slower plane and have a better seat.
Unfortunately, that never seems to be an option. With the way corporations work, you'll have a choice between fast and expensive but cramped like a sardine, or slow and cheap but cramped like a sardine. You'll also need to bring plenty of change to use the restroom.
Re:Intrigued to know more (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slower than current aircraft (Score:1, Insightful)
For most trips customers won't even notice. A 3 hour flight only consists of 1.5 or so hours of transit. The rest is take off, landing and holding patterns. On intercontinental flights that 10% speed reduction will add up, but an 8 hour flight turning into an 9 hour flight isn't that huge when you compare it to the potential cost savings. And, yes you could fly 737s slower, but they wouldn't save on fuel. They are designed around a certain fuel economy at a certain speed. Remember they are burning a large ammount of their fuel just to keep up in the air. If it were as simple as flying slower to save fuel all the carriers would be doing it already.
Re:hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
The extra distance would also cost fuel, more fuel, more weight, fewer paying passengers, lower profits and now that route isn't viable, more time in the air, more maintenance and less total life on the airframe.
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Booms aren't just loud, they also smash Windows and American law-makers care; the FAA specifically bans not sonic booms, but *all* supersonic flight. So even if you came up with a boomless SST, you'd still need the get permissions to go supersonic!
Your views on trips are also rather US-centric. There are a lot of aircraft flying from Europe to Asia, all over land.
If it had not been for this minor boom problem, Concorde would have been a much bigger success.
Re:How Fast? (Score:3, Insightful)
The ratio of length to chord of a wing is refered to as aspect ratio.
To simplify somewhat, the tip of a wing is always
producing a vortex, which reduces the lift contribution of that part of the wing, and increases drag. Winglets are desigend to help reduce this loss.
So the longer the wing the less percentage of it is tip, and the efficency increases.
Hence gliders having high aspect ratio wings.
At low speeds this is good, but at mach speeds a low aspect ratio delta wing gets better results.
It is difficult to make a thin high aspect ratio wing strong due to engineering constraints.(The thinner the wing the more strength required in the main spar which carries the bending loads)
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Booms aren't just loud, they also smash Windows and American law-makers care; the FAA specifically bans not sonic booms, but *all* supersonic flight.
I don't know about the FAA, but I've heard tons of sonic booms from F-16s, and they fly supersonic here all the time. I live in a large metro area near an F-16 training base.
Your views on trips are also rather US-centric. There are a lot of aircraft flying from Europe to Asia, all over land.
Yep, those won't be able to go supersonic. I didn't say all planes could do it, just that there's a lot of long-distance traffic that flies mostly over water.
If it had not been for this minor boom problem, Concorde would have been a much bigger success.
I have a feeling the $5-10k ticket price (in 80s dollars) was also a "minor" problem with the Concorde.
If someone wanted to make a supersonic plane that was economically feasible, they'd make it small, like the size of a Cessna Citation X or some other small corporate jet, or maybe smaller. They'd need to figure out how to get the ticket price down to $10-25k per ticket, with only ~20 passengers or so. There simply aren't enough rich people going the same place, at the same time, to fill up some giant jet with hundreds of seats. However, getting 20 rich people going the same place at the same time who want to get there quickly is a much smaller problem.
Re:My plane uses 100% less fuel. (Score:3, Insightful)
As a working figure, 330M per 10KM is an glide ratio (L/D) of 30. Are you claiming an L/D of 600+?
Re:Not quite... (Score:2, Insightful)
We really need a new term for all these "we have a pretty picture and some untested numbers we came up with" articles. Vaporware doesn't really cut it anymore. Something like renderware, or CGIware, or imagineware...
The term you're looking for is "conceptual design."
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, good point.
See my OP for an example of Slashdot: Where you can get +1 interesting for a completely wrong post.
Re:Intrigued to know more (Score:2, Insightful)
Rest assured that all of the US based carriers will cram as many seats in as possible...
Guess you've never been on a Japan Airlines flight!
strong whiff of 'Jetsons' fantasy horseshit here. (Score:3, Insightful)
...while accounting for the changes in air travel in 2035 -- when air traffic is expected to double -- would require "a radical change,"
These guys are in a clusterfuck headspace. They are basically throwing fantasies off each other.
Given the present state of known oil reserves (and the difficulties in accessing those reserves), the current depletion rate, and the expanding rate of oil usage in the developing world, NO ONE seriously expects air traffic to double by 2035. No one except a handful of tech nerds in NASA and the Defense Department think-tanks who get paid big bucks to let their imaginations run wild without any consideration of the conditions in the real world.
The airlines will be lucky to exist at all by 2035. In all likelyhood, there will be one airline in the world that offers once daily flights across the major oceans at enormous cost for the public, and small-jet charter service for the ultra-rich. The hoards of lower-middle-class masses (that you and me and rest of the Slashdaughters reading this) are not going to jetting to Vegas or Hawaii for wild-weekends as they did during the millenium years 1985-2010. Every six months we read in the business sections about another national airline merging with a major carrier and the major carriers merging with each other. What was it last month? Oh yeah, United and Continental merging because they are both going broke as individual companies.
I also fail to see how a plane design that looks more or less exactly like all the other plane designs is going to be able to fly 100+ passengers with 70% less fuel. Maybe I missed the football-field-sized helium balloon that was attached to the fuselage (and cropped from the picture). Oh yeah, the front nose looks beveled. And this is supposed to give it 'super lift'. If this were the case, don't you think that Boeing and/or Tupolev would have figured that out twenty years ago?
Again, these guys get paid to fantasize. Not produce reality. They're the same type of guys who promised us Howard Johnson's restaurants on space stations and PanAm weekly service to luxury hotels on the moon in the film 2001:A Space Odyssey forty years ago. And what was 2001 in reality? Millions of screaming kids and dorks in shorts riding a trashy 30-year old 737 to Branson and Disneyland.
Trust your instincts. Don't trust MIT/NASA reports.
Re:Slower than current aircraft (Score:3, Insightful)