7 Flights Into the Future

GE's Benzakein sees similar revolutions in big-aircraft design. "We will have morphing aircraft. New materials will allow you to change your shape so you have wings that will behave differently at takeoff and during cruise. I'm sure that will happen." In that future, a Chicago-departing passenger, his airplane rising and banking over Lake Michigan, will look out the window and see not big, clunky flaps going up and down but a variable and textured wing that changes shape to maximize aerodynamic performance: an airplane much more bird-like than ever before.


There is bad news, however, for seven decades of dreamers, hustlers and homebuilders who have preached that the vertical-takeoff personal flying machine is just around the next cloud. Hovering air cars (as opposed to airport-based, commercially operated air taxis, which may be VTOL) are impractical, Rutan and Moore argue: too much noise and turbulence for the cul-de-sac. Personal VTOL machines would lack a helicopter's emergency autorotation capability and wouldn't glide. Your neighbor's hovering air car would drop like a stone into your patio party when his engines failed, regardless of how smart the technology was that helped it fly when all systems were go. All the air-car noodling, which has received considerable play in Popular Science since the 1920s, simply doesn't have enough R&D behind it. "The people who have been trying to do this for the last 70 years haven't had the facilities, expertise or funding to really do it right," says Moore, whose vision includes a short-runway, easy-to-manufacture personal aircraft powered by the reliable and inexpensive Corvette LS1 engine. "They
have not been performing systems studies of the
technologies. They've been putting stuff together in their garages and trying to pull it off. Well, that's a chaotic way to try to do research."


MacCready pauses the conversation to emphasize that aviation must also move toward a more environmentally and socially responsible position in the world. He challenges the silent assumption that fossil fuels will continue to power future aircraft. "We're going to find that the amount of fossil fuels being burned is having genuine, deleterious effects on Earth's atmosphere. . . . Fifty years from now, even airplanes, which make the best possible use of fossil fuel, may not have any to use at all."


GE's Benzakein predicts that the problem will begin to be addressed by the integration of fuel cells, first in aircraft auxiliary power units, then as the primary power sources for small aircraft, and finally in large-aircraft power systems. "They're here to stay," he says. "But they're heavy, and we need to make them lighter. I think they'll be hydrogen-fueled, and they will take care of all the pollution issues we have."

HEAVY IRON: A RADICAL NEW SHAPE



What will the large airplanes, the so-called
heavy iron, look like? Airbus's Brown sees no diversion from the wing-and-tube design favored for airliners in the past century, though new aerodynamic features and engine designs will continue to wring more efficiency out of each passenger mile. The juicy improvements, Brown says, will occur inside the airplane: "The aircraft will be so big that the opportunity will be taken not just to pack the thing absolutely full of seats but really to try and make the flight a little bit more of a tolerable and survivable experience by using the space for unconventional things, allowing
passengers to socialize a little bit, to relax. Maybe people dismiss it as a dream today, but I think we may see some exercise facilities, duty-free shops, libraries. I don't go quite as far as casinos and swimming pools, but some sort of [recreation] space there." This, of course, echoes the predictions that Boeing made when it hyped the go-go lounges on the top deck of the 747 in the '60s; those dream spaces were quickly replaced by first- or business-class seats. But Airbus points out that the full-length double-deck design of the A380 produces such a vast increase in usable space that exercise rooms or offices may be available after the need for passenger volume has been satisfied.



Boeing's Muellner imagines a far more radical aircraft: Engineers will finally embrace blended-wing-body (BWB) design. Imagine a giant,
double-decker flying triangle, engines incorporated into the back of the aircraft, with passengers sitting in an enormous space dozens of rows wide. The concept is decades old, and one version appeared on the cover of
Popular Science in 1995. The wide, aerodynamic fuselage is just as safe as tube-and-wing, Muellner says, and more efficient. "I've been trying to push blended-wing-bodies for the four-plus years I've been with Boeing," Muellner says. "I have to tell you, I don't get a positive response from my Seattle community. [But] we go out and do passenger acceptance tests, and nobody [objects]. We do emergency evac tests and it turns out you can actually evacuate it faster than you can a tube. But at Boeing—and I don't know about Airbus, but I wouldn't be surprised to find the same thing—we have a tube-and-wing mentality."