Future airliners
- Thread starter Johnbr
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I took a quick look. It's 388 pages, from 2005. Lots of neat alternative designs for airliners. Also some neat information that you don't normally think about, such as how passengers have changed over the years--bigger, heavier, more casual and less business, more demanding for services.
I don't know a lot about commercial airliners, but my impression is that radical change simply is not in the cards. In order to really break out of the current limitations on fuel, economy, payload, etc., you need to get away from the tube and wing design to something else. At the very least you have to change the engine type and location and wing design.
The problem is that there's no indication that Airbus or Boeing really want to risk this. Currently they are both breaking into composites for a majority of their structure. And that's not been going well for Boeing, with many delays on the 787. Once the 787 and Airbus' version enter service it will take a decade or more before the companies have good data on how that jump to composites is working (how will the planes age, for instance?). And even if it goes well, I think that the next step is to simply apply composites to all their other classes of airplanes, such as a composite equivalent of the popular 787.
As much as I think the giant BWB design is cool, unless somebody like DoD or NASA takes the initiative to fund a prototype, I don't see anything like that flying commercially for 2-4 decades.
I don't know a lot about commercial airliners, but my impression is that radical change simply is not in the cards. In order to really break out of the current limitations on fuel, economy, payload, etc., you need to get away from the tube and wing design to something else. At the very least you have to change the engine type and location and wing design.
The problem is that there's no indication that Airbus or Boeing really want to risk this. Currently they are both breaking into composites for a majority of their structure. And that's not been going well for Boeing, with many delays on the 787. Once the 787 and Airbus' version enter service it will take a decade or more before the companies have good data on how that jump to composites is working (how will the planes age, for instance?). And even if it goes well, I think that the next step is to simply apply composites to all their other classes of airplanes, such as a composite equivalent of the popular 787.
As much as I think the giant BWB design is cool, unless somebody like DoD or NASA takes the initiative to fund a prototype, I don't see anything like that flying commercially for 2-4 decades.
