What I really want, is a plane that can load passengers like containers--or like a rollercoaster car. Of course, it should be comfortable. I just mean that the passenger compartment should be modular. So you can put your luggage in and get settled while sitting in the airport, and then when the plane comes in, it just side-loads everyone all at once. Once landed, it just slides everyone off, and you can just
I know that the crew uses the typical seating time to refuel and load luggage in the underbelly, but one can dream of not having to wait to get off the airplane.
Haven't heard of this company before. A good synopsis I dug up in their fundraising announcement:
> JetZero, co-founded in 2020 by start-up veteran Tom O’Leary and aerospace legend Mark Page, is developing the world’s first commercial all-wing airplane. With up to 50% better fuel efficiency and lower carbon emissions compared to existing commercial airliners, JetZero's Z4 will offer the aviation industry a clear path to achieving its 2050 net-zero goals while also elevating the passenger experience. Working alongside the US Air Force, NASA, and the FAA, and backed by decades of investment and research into blended wing technology. JetZero looks to enter commercial service in the early 2030s.
Where an "all-wing" airplane is, kudos to Gemini,
> one that merges the main body and wings into a single lifting surface. This can reduce drag, lower fuel burn, and expand interior space.
Why has one of the images in the header carrousel got it featuring what looks like a refueling probe for refueling other aircraft sticking out the back? The other two don't.
It looks like they've taken this mostly from an older Boeing BWB design for future air-to-air refueling aircraft (although the wing shape is a bit different).
Tangentially related Good news: You can avoid about half the greenhouse effects of flight by slightly changing the flight plan to avoid cloud forming regions
Bad news: this generally wasn't counted before and when counted roughly doubles the impact so in some senses you're back to where you started.
But it's a much lower hanging fruit than anything else and as yet we're not doing it.
Big screens are an OK workaround for no passenger windows, but they still have to contend with severe structural pressurization challenges, strict emergency evacuation rules, and incompatibility with current airport gates.
In a conventional aircraft you sit on the roll axis. In a blended wing body design you can have off-axis motion that can increase motion sickness. Rather than rolling with the longitudinal axis of the aircraft, you move up and down when the aircraft banks. Not necessarily a deal breaker, but an additional difference to deal with.
> Note, too, that a larger lifting body needs to bank less to execute the same turn as a craft with more loading.
This is not really helpful for passenger comfort. For a turn to be comfortable, you want the turn to be such that the effective force the passengers feel has no sideways (relative to the passengers) component, and the required roll angle is only a function of the velocity and turning radius. The aircraft design is irrelevant.
I don't understand your point. Does the wider passenger compartment leads to more extreme transitions at the edges? Is there something else at play I'm not thinking of?
Picture being on the end of the wing and how much you move up or down when the plane rolls.
An airliner entering a 30 degree roll over 3 seconds would have passengers pop up or down 25 feet, with at least +0.3 and -0.3G of acceleration. It would come with a "going over the top of the roller coaster" feeling. This is in addition to the roll / rotation.
No way. Looking out the window is one of the joys of flying.
Picking out my house, seeing tiny cars on a remote highway, etc. Even 100+ MP cameras and high resolution screens won't come close to that level of detail.
But are you willing to pay 10-20% more for that joy? I personally would rather pay less money to fly, not get to see out the window, and spend those dollars on, say, a fancier meal at the destination. Or to have an extra day at the destination if my trip length is money-bound rather than time-bound. Or put those dollars towards an extra hour of childcare. Or … I have so many uses for dollars that give me more utility than “see out the window while flying”.
Where that number comes from: they claim 50% reduction in fuel consumption, which sounds doubtful to me, and fuel is about a third of flight costs, and I’m making some generous assumptions around perfect competition.
My primary destination is Europe <> NZ which is about 24 hours in air so personally I'd give up everything for flat seat. Doesn't have to be business class seat - just something barest of the bare, basically bunk beds.
Thing is with current structure airlines would dilute business class too much and airplane manufacturers would increase density all while decreasing fuel use per passenger - none of which is desirable.
I've been that guy, but only if the scenery is interesting. Still, my attitude is that at noon, people don't need to have a blanket placed over their cage like parrots to make them sleep.
I also was on a flight once that had a very bouncy landing with all the windows down - when I didn't realize we were anywhere near the ground yet. I'm not into tuning out reality to that degree, and don't really feel obligated to help anyone else do so either ;)
Regulations require that window shades be up (open) during take off and landing.
I was sitting next to a passenger once who was asked by the steward to raise the window shade.
While doing it, they asked "why". Answering for the steward I said "it's so Fire and Rescue can see into the plane if we crash". (Which is true, I used to work at airport fire and rescue.)
The steward looked at me with a "that's not helpful" look. My bad :( .
Although I think it's still useful for people to understand things are done for their safety. Not that we expect to crash, and most don't, but every little thing that might improve survival is done. That encourages rather than discourages me.
I'm fine with not looking out of the window if the seat is comfortable and I can get to the bathroom more easily. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. Window enjoyers such as yourself will still be able to get the window seats.
I don’t know how many people are claustrophobic, but for me this would be a non-starter.
Edit: apparently 12.5% of the population has claustrophobia. If 5% of flyers choose a different airline due to simulated windows that would wipe out any cost benefit from fuel savings.
I don't think it is that simple. If a route has mixed offerings and the cheaper option is the windowless plane, it's likely to be full and they'll save on fuel costs for the full flight and can charge extra for a normal flight off hours and come out way ahead.
Be nice to not have to deal with that one guy who didn’t close their window when it’s dark cabin time on long multi-Timezone flights; leaving the sun to blare in when you’re really trying to get some shut eye.
No, virtually all the radiation with the exception of UV is passing straight through the airframe. The protection an aircraft body offers is negligible.
Jeez way to ruin of the few remaining joys of flying. Lock everyone in a tin can. You will experience reality through screens only and you will enjoy it
Not this again. They’ve clearly hired a new PR firm
Suffice it to say, from stable aeronautics at-edge, jet way footprint efficiency, ground support efficiency, airframe pressurization, cargo & passenger logistics, lifespan, and certification, there are many, many reasons “tube + wings” is the dominant airframe architecture for all non-military aircraft.
There are many reasons for a lot of things, until you overcome those reasons. That's the point of innovation. There are many reasons not to make a reusable rocket too.
theres just some serious serious challenges here i dont think any of them are impossible to overcome but it would span so many more years and so much more funding to get thru. fuselage pressurization which they claim to have worked around (sus) is one of the spookiest imo.
traditional looking commercial jets, their designs, their manufacturing processes, their innovations (yes boeing/airbus do innovate and have for a long time even though it doesnt seem that way) have all been shaped heavily by human blood. to some degree a radical new design almost guarantees more deaths at a commercial level there's really no shortcutting this without it.
dont get me wrong im super open to the possibility that something like this is possible itd be better for the whole world, but there's no way we get there without re-experiencing some hard lessons if we want to push it pash some sort of proverbial finish line
Even small changes to time tested designs provide significant risk. A completely new body style will inevitably provide completely new failure modes.
Pressurizing a tube vs pressurizing a pancake (or flattened sphere, or some other easy approximation) will have very different mechanical loading characteristics. Turbulence (differences in air speed/pressure) across a large flat-ish surface that also has a signifiant pressure differential will also prove challenging to design for and scale up.
Aerospace is a very high dimensional design process. Doing anything different puts you into unknown territory real fast.
If some letters were capitalized it would be easier to read but without this gets downvoted as wordsalad. Almost illegible. Punctuation exists for a reason.
Agreed. There are always large amounts of money being poured into aviation and most of what comes out is knowledge.
It's always exciting to see futuristic designs and bleeding edge tech but there are a lot of footnotes in aviation history filled with these.
I think electric aviation (in general aviation) is probably the best/real frontier to watch for innovation currently. Many advances in aviation come from much smaller operations doing something successfully.
An experimental/homebuilt of similar but not exactly the same design, the Dyke Delta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyke_Delta of which about 50 have been built, has its pilots reporting a comfortable ride.
Interesting choice to build in Greensboro. That's also where Boom chose to build a factory and it looks massive as you leave the airport. The plan for this company's factory looks like it will be significantly larger.
JetZero’s Demonstrator is on track for first-flight in 2027. The Demonstrator is being built in partnership with Scaled Composites, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman.
Scaled Composites? Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time…
Fluid dynamics is my jam (most of my masters was studying it)! Even in the intro to fluid mechanics book, they spent a good half+ chapter why a flying wing is superior and how you can have it designed similar to movie theater seating. But my professor spent a class explaining why regulation will kill it even though the design is great.
This reeks of Vern Raburn and Eclipse Aviation all over again, haha. That failed terribly. SV’s ego is pretty funny sometimes. Eclipse even tried to develop their own avionics.
Hard to imagine it as a passenger aircraft any time soon, but if they manage to get the demonstrator built it looks like it could make a useful aerial refueling tanker.
The people they do that have a lot of experience and make a lot of money. Fortunately, most of the world doesn’t have the software business’ cavalier attitude about safety-related things being perfectly safe.
I wish them all the luck in the world. Aviation is in a massive rut and needs bold new designs and innovation. That being said, what makes this company different from the others that have come before? What makes their path to success more likely? The problem is likely less the technology and more the decade(s?) of burning money with no ability to sell anything because you have to certify everything. That cliff is so bad we got the 737 max instead of a real new design. In an industry where new tech should be bringing us new commercial designs yearly we are instead getting very minor iterations because even the massive players out there can't afford to bring a 'new' design to the table. I -really- want to see this succeed. Good luck.
> Aviation is in a massive rut and needs bold new designs and innovation.
Why does it need bold new design and innovation? More people (can afford to) fly every year, more safely, and with broadly more consistency than they ever have. The success of the commercial aviation industry as a whole is breathtaking.
From an engineering perspective, it's a solved task. Designing an airplane is on par with designing a suspension bridge.
From a regulatory perspective, the layers of bureaucracy needed to get approval to build a bridge has nothing on starting up an airline manufacturing company. Once you have a company with a history of approval, you can practically do what you want, but getting to that point is nearly impossible.
The difference is that there establishment space launch companies were basically monopolies using ancient technology and processes. That’s not true for commercial aviation, which is subject to pretty relentless cost pressures.
Seems like that’s what a lot of people say about a lot of legacy businesses though when facing pressure from a startup. Obviously doesn’t always work, but sometimes!
Bullshit i cant hear you. Commcercial airliners are sold at a loss and are basically giant jobs programs. Modern jetliners are enormously efficient already; there has been a continuous race over the last century to this end.
Feels like no windows is almost a deal-breaker? No? Do humans handle small enclosed spaces with no way to look outside well? The mock-up image looks like a small two-or-three seat compartment, which seems like it would be awful. Maybe an open space would be less claustrophobic, but still. Imagining just a normal jetliner today with no windows feels... not great. And I'm not sure having a giant flat screen wrapped around me would solve the problem.
I don't mind no windows at all if they have "digital windows" as substitutes. You're already 40,000ft in the air I think windows aren't really gonna help your claustrophobia. Not like you can open the door and walk out for a bit.
I get motion sickness when sitting sideways or backwards on a car. People tend to become nauseous when they sense motion but don't see it, or what they see doesn't align with their other senses. Even the small amount of lag that a "digital window" would likely have, will make things much worse.
Maybe. I think people could survive it, sure. But I also wonder if there's a part of our lizard brain that just for safety's sake prefers to be able to see out of any small enclosed space we might find ourselves in. And that lizard brain is smart enough to know that a flat screen is fake. Again, I just think of flying in a plane today but with no windows and I, at least, am immediately squigged out.
I also feel like a lot of modern air travel is designed around making something that's highly unnatural and inherently terrifying into something palatable for most people. I'm not talking about actual safety, but the perception of safety. Which isn't exactly a logic thing. More about keeping that lizard brain from freaking out too hard.
Actually no windows doesn't even pass Passenger Flight rules and regulations. In Asia, its mandatory that windows should be opened, visible during takeoff and landing.
I know that the crew uses the typical seating time to refuel and load luggage in the underbelly, but one can dream of not having to wait to get off the airplane.
> JetZero, co-founded in 2020 by start-up veteran Tom O’Leary and aerospace legend Mark Page, is developing the world’s first commercial all-wing airplane. With up to 50% better fuel efficiency and lower carbon emissions compared to existing commercial airliners, JetZero's Z4 will offer the aviation industry a clear path to achieving its 2050 net-zero goals while also elevating the passenger experience. Working alongside the US Air Force, NASA, and the FAA, and backed by decades of investment and research into blended wing technology. JetZero looks to enter commercial service in the early 2030s.
Where an "all-wing" airplane is, kudos to Gemini,
> one that merges the main body and wings into a single lifting surface. This can reduce drag, lower fuel burn, and expand interior space.
It looks like they've taken this mostly from an older Boeing BWB design for future air-to-air refueling aircraft (although the wing shape is a bit different).
Bad news: this generally wasn't counted before and when counted roughly doubles the impact so in some senses you're back to where you started.
But it's a much lower hanging fruit than anything else and as yet we're not doing it.
This sounds fixable in avionics and training. (Shallow, gradual banks.)
Note, too, that a larger lifting body needs to bank less to execute the same turn as a craft with more loading.
This is not really helpful for passenger comfort. For a turn to be comfortable, you want the turn to be such that the effective force the passengers feel has no sideways (relative to the passengers) component, and the required roll angle is only a function of the velocity and turning radius. The aircraft design is irrelevant.
The Wikipedia article is mediocre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_flight
An airliner entering a 30 degree roll over 3 seconds would have passengers pop up or down 25 feet, with at least +0.3 and -0.3G of acceleration. It would come with a "going over the top of the roller coaster" feeling. This is in addition to the roll / rotation.
Yaw is interesting for similar reasons.
Picking out my house, seeing tiny cars on a remote highway, etc. Even 100+ MP cameras and high resolution screens won't come close to that level of detail.
Where that number comes from: they claim 50% reduction in fuel consumption, which sounds doubtful to me, and fuel is about a third of flight costs, and I’m making some generous assumptions around perfect competition.
Thing is with current structure airlines would dilute business class too much and airplane manufacturers would increase density all while decreasing fuel use per passenger - none of which is desirable.
And that's before we talk about night flights when there's nothing to see, flights over water when there's nothing to see and so on.
So yes, I'm sure some people like windows. But the majority have demonstrated that they're just fine flying without them.
I also was on a flight once that had a very bouncy landing with all the windows down - when I didn't realize we were anywhere near the ground yet. I'm not into tuning out reality to that degree, and don't really feel obligated to help anyone else do so either ;)
I was sitting next to a passenger once who was asked by the steward to raise the window shade.
While doing it, they asked "why". Answering for the steward I said "it's so Fire and Rescue can see into the plane if we crash". (Which is true, I used to work at airport fire and rescue.)
The steward looked at me with a "that's not helpful" look. My bad :( .
Although I think it's still useful for people to understand things are done for their safety. Not that we expect to crash, and most don't, but every little thing that might improve survival is done. That encourages rather than discourages me.
Edit: apparently 12.5% of the population has claustrophobia. If 5% of flyers choose a different airline due to simulated windows that would wipe out any cost benefit from fuel savings.
Ah... A dream
Just hope they don’t make an “ad-free” window a premium upgrade…
Suffice it to say, from stable aeronautics at-edge, jet way footprint efficiency, ground support efficiency, airframe pressurization, cargo & passenger logistics, lifespan, and certification, there are many, many reasons “tube + wings” is the dominant airframe architecture for all non-military aircraft.
traditional looking commercial jets, their designs, their manufacturing processes, their innovations (yes boeing/airbus do innovate and have for a long time even though it doesnt seem that way) have all been shaped heavily by human blood. to some degree a radical new design almost guarantees more deaths at a commercial level there's really no shortcutting this without it.
dont get me wrong im super open to the possibility that something like this is possible itd be better for the whole world, but there's no way we get there without re-experiencing some hard lessons if we want to push it pash some sort of proverbial finish line
This assumes the lessons were specific to the body type and aren’t generalizable?
Pressurizing a tube vs pressurizing a pancake (or flattened sphere, or some other easy approximation) will have very different mechanical loading characteristics. Turbulence (differences in air speed/pressure) across a large flat-ish surface that also has a signifiant pressure differential will also prove challenging to design for and scale up.
Aerospace is a very high dimensional design process. Doing anything different puts you into unknown territory real fast.
It's always exciting to see futuristic designs and bleeding edge tech but there are a lot of footnotes in aviation history filled with these.
I think electric aviation (in general aviation) is probably the best/real frontier to watch for innovation currently. Many advances in aviation come from much smaller operations doing something successfully.
Novel things always look unviable. First cars, first planes, first EVs all looked like dubious gimmicks sorely lacking the required infrastructure.
Scaled Composites? Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time…
Presumably we haven't heard as much after Northrop bought them?
I think it's awesome that Scaled Composites is involved... they really have such specialized knowledge of all kinds of aeronautical engineering.
Btw, it will take hydrogen propulsion for their planes to be zero CO2 emission.
Why does it need bold new design and innovation? More people (can afford to) fly every year, more safely, and with broadly more consistency than they ever have. The success of the commercial aviation industry as a whole is breathtaking.
From a regulatory perspective, the layers of bureaucracy needed to get approval to build a bridge has nothing on starting up an airline manufacturing company. Once you have a company with a history of approval, you can practically do what you want, but getting to that point is nearly impossible.
I also feel like a lot of modern air travel is designed around making something that's highly unnatural and inherently terrifying into something palatable for most people. I'm not talking about actual safety, but the perception of safety. Which isn't exactly a logic thing. More about keeping that lizard brain from freaking out too hard.