A flight for the price of a taxi to the field: meet Boeing's future plane

Hello, this is the captain; The Boeing Company is preparing a revolution for us. Not a new passenger plane, but a completely new form for such planes. A shape that has its roots in the plane that makes all passenger planes look the same, it goes through an invention from 120 years ago and ends up in your pocket.

For the previous “Captain” series:

How’s the pocket? Because this future plane will have such low fuel consumption that any airline in the world will be able to sell all its tickets at almost half price, without losing even one dollar in revenue. Just think what it will do to the low-cost world: a flight to Europe will cost as much as a hamburger and a drink in the field.

Let’s start with the current form: the large passenger planes are so similar to each other because in the industry they don’t think about originality – all the airlines want a plane that is very fuel efficient, that is comfortable and stable in the air, easy to maintain on the ground and of a size that fits the airport. It is simply the shape that did all of these best.

It was born in 1954, in a project called Dash 80: a Boeing development that combined a long, cylindrical body with swept-back wings, under which were four engines. From it was produced the Boeing 707 and later all the rest of the seven-number-seven series.

Over time, the engines became more powerful and reliable and the configuration became two-engine, and was adopted throughout the industry. The secret of success is the wings: Boeing made them swept back, long and thin, and they allowed efficient and sufficiently economical flight.

Originally, the wings were born for a jet bomber named B47 (bomber With a piece of story, worth reading), to carry it long distances at high speed, and the business worked great even when carrying passengers instead of bombs. But it’s time for a change: we’ve exhausted the current form. So how do you take the most economical form that humanity has found, and reinvent it?

First, let’s start with the engines: for them to be efficient, they have to be as big as possible. A turbofan engine of a jet plane sucks in a lot of air and accelerates it, but only a small part passes through the core, mixes with fuel and becomes a prop jet. Everything else simply bypasses the engine and joins the thrust behind it.

Therefore, a large engine draws more air and produces more thrust with less fuel. The problem is that engines that are too big will already scrape the floor, and you probably guessed that this is something that engines really don’t like. Therefore, the plane of the future will need a high wing, one that is above the body like in the Cessna 172 – and thus there will be room for engines with an increased diameter.

Second, to fly without burning a lot of fuel, you need a wing that provides a lot of lift. For example, a very thin one, with a large ratio between length and width. A wing like a glider for example. Therefore, this is what the wing of the future airplane will look like.

And this creates a bit of an engineering challenge: today, passenger planes have a wing in the shape of a lug, the so-called cantilever: a narrow engineering unit that is connected to the main structure on one side, and basically carries its own weight. To do this, the wing contains strong beams, which also provide flexibility.

Inside the new thin wing there is no room for large beams – but even here the solution comes from Cessna: struts that come out of the body and connect to the wing from below. This is an invention that comes to us from the days of the Wright brothers: the strut will receive a section of a wing, and thus it will produce lift by itself; This plane will be a bi-wing drop tip.

The result will look like this: a vessel with a narrow body like the 737 Max (cabin with one aisle, six in a row), an upper wing with a long spar of at least 50 m, and fat engines. The struts at the bottom will give it an elegant silhouette of a bow rifle. And to match the size for parking at the airport, the wings will fold up or back.

While cruising, it will behave like a normal plane, and will be able to fly like it at a speed of 850 km/h. The wing will be particularly flexible and will probably flap more than today’s planes, but in the cabin you will not feel the difference.

Let’s move on to the main course: what will this plane give you? Given that fuel is the biggest expense of any airline, the answer is “a lot.”

The new wing will represent a 10% fuel saving over the most efficient Boeing 737. The engines will add another 30% of savings, and new maintenance management technologies will lower the price even further.

The result: airlines will be able to cut the prices of all flights by dozens of percent, and still earn more than they do today. And in the low cost category? A flight to Europe could cost less than the taxi that brought you to Israel, not as a “landlord gone crazy” style deal, but as a standard.

Where are the minuses? Such an aircraft may have a narrower wheelbase, which can change the landing profile a bit. The team will have to arrive at a slightly different angle, and make a more gradual descent.

This means slightly more training and certification hours, more practice and conversion costs for the airline. For you it means softer landings.

How will the plane affect the market? The fuel savings can also be translated into flight distance: today most of the burden of flights is carried by the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 models, and they are the ones that take you to every corner of Europe. An aircraft of this size that will receive the new design will also be able to fly to the USA and the Far East.

I’m not sure that will happen anytime soon: today the long-haul market is dominated by large planes that carry more than 250 passengers, and Boeing will not want the new plane to compete with the late models of the 787 and 777 – models that bring in a lot of money.

However, there is a demand for a long-range intermediate model – something that is between the size of the 737 and the 787, and can still reach all corners of the world, land at a variety of airports and fit into smaller parking spaces in terminals.

Therefore, I think it is likely that the first model with the new design that Boeing will launch will be precisely in this niche. That way you can continue to offer the 737 Max to its models and make money without competing with yourself.

In this way, the manufacturer will also be able to build an appetite among the airlines, who will ask it to launch a smaller version of the new plane. This way you will get a winning presence both in a new and promising category, and also in the most profitable category.

An airplane in the new configuration that will be the size of a 777 will need completely different wings and engines, which will again require a long development time and very significant revolutions in the field of propulsion and materials. Therefore, probably the biggest planes will also be the last to change.

And Boeing believes so much in this development that it has announced that it will not develop any new passenger planes at all until the next decade, when various engine technologies will mature – for example, an open fan engine, which we will talk about another time – and its new design.

The company came up with the design of the wing with the support as part of a project from ten years ago called “environmentally friendly ultra-subsonic aircraft research”, English acronyms: SUGAR; No, the Americans are simply champions of the Milky Way for short.

The new shape project is carried out in collaboration with NASA, which also finances a large part of it. The aerospace agency sees this development as a national interest, for two reasons. The first is that the world is in the midst of an energy crisis and airplanes that drink less fuel can help. Certainly when the rate of population growth is fast, and there are more people who want to fly

The second reason is that NASA is a government body that does not live in a vacuum: European Airbus gets more contracts than Boeing, is growing fast, and that’s a lot of foreign money pouring into the pockets of France and not the United States.

Therefore, NASA and Boeing are expected to invest a huge fortune in reinventing the passenger plane, even if it means that it will take ten years for it to become a commercial reality. Developing such planes is always a long-term gamble, and it is not easy to bring about revolutions in the field.

I wonder what Airbus will present against this development. The competitor across the ocean is also looking for solutions for a more economical and efficient flight, among other things through engines that work on liquid hydrogen and environmentally friendly technologies.

For sure, the ones who will benefit are the passengers; The next level jump will be fuel savings at the level of tens of percent – and this improvement will be well felt in the ticket price. Have a nice flight!

A flight for the price of a taxi to the field: meet Boeing’s future plane

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