7 Flights Into the Future

Brown says Airbus won't build a BWB aircraft because of scale challenges: Wingspans would be too big for airports. But Muellner says new research shows that BWB wingspans can be smaller than those of conventional aircraft. In spite of Boeing's current reluctance (and its focus on developing the efficient 7E7 airliner), he predicts BWB aircraft will enter service in this century, first as military and cargo aircraft, and then as commercial air transports—complete with high-resolution video screens that allow the passengers in the middle of the aircraft to see the world outside.

YOUR AIRPLANE WILL FLY HIGHER, FASTER



A week before the roundtable, Air france and British Airways announced their plans to halt Concorde service, grounding the only supersonic commercial aircraft. To Brown, that signaled the end of supersonic civilian flight. "There was a period in my life when I used that airplane a lot," he says, "and it was an unconfined joy to leave Toulouse at half past 6 in the morning, take a Concorde connection out of Paris Charles de Gaulle, and get in to our office in Manhattan before the guys who were commuting in from Connecticut. But that's rather childish, and it ignores the enormous cost involved. We have seen the flying boats go and I rather fear that when Concorde stops this year, we are going to see the supersonic go. And it's very, very difficult to see it coming back."



Propulsion expert Benzakein, however, remains bullish on the prospects of supersonic commercial travel in the coming decades, particularly in smaller aircraft than Concorde. "High-speed flight, whether it's at Mach 2 or Mach 4 or 5, will occur," Benzakein says, citing coming advancements in pulse-detonation engines and other sources of efficient high-speed power. "It might start with the supersonic business jet first. There's a market out there that says we can take people from Point A to Point B in half the time that we're taking [them] today."


Crucial to development of small supersonic aircraft are aerodynamic and noise-control advances, which will suppress the boom and make supersonic flight feasible over land. (Significant progress occurred in late August when Northrop Grumman flew a heavily modified F-5E that
successfully reduced the boom.) This will vastly increase the demand for supersonic aircraft among billionaire entrepreneurs and mega-corporations; both will want them for prestige and efficiency. With a viable commercial supersonic industry in place, an airliner could follow in another 20 years, Benzakein predicts. Growth of the Asian market will prime the pump, with trans-Pacific flights ideal for these aircraft.


Rutan disagrees. "How many people really need that advantage? It's too small to bother." Instead Rutan believes aircraft will leapfrog over supersonic flight to hypersonic, suborbital travel. Diamandis, whose X Prize Foundation is offering $10 million to the first group that can successfully prove the concept, offers a similar argument. "People ask, 'How can you have suborbital flight when the Concorde was such a failure?' It's like asking why we don't have boats that travel at 1,000 mph. Well, you'd rather get up out of the water and into the thinner air to travel 1,000 mph. And you'd like to get out of the air and get into the vacuum of space to travel at high speeds."


The challenge will be to make suborbital spaceflight economical. Rutan, who is considered one of few among
nearly two dozen X Prize competitors to have a viable program, insists that a low-cost, high-risk ethic must prevail during what he predicts will be a boom in aviation development akin to that of 1909 to 1912, when an explosion of experimentation turned the Wright brothers' invention into the foundation for an industry. For suborbital flight to go critical, Rutan says, a similar boom must happen now—and he calls it the next revolution in aviation design.


"People will eventually realize the correct approach to do a mission is to absolutely use the lowest technology that will do the mission, instead of the highest level of technology, such as in the manned space program," Rutan says. "That is exactly how it's been done, and that's why we have something that's so expensive to fly we can't afford it."


Diamandis insists the X Prize can be a platform from which to launch Rutan's suborbital boom. "We have 24 teams now that are vying for the X Prize," Diamandis says. "Some of them are literally building with spare parts and only a few million dollars. Now, they may or may not succeed on that, but it shows the diversity of approaches from the nontraditional players."