Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 189 posts

Re: Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

#21

Post by VBprogrammer »

alexpotato wrote: post #5

Interesting historical note on the blended wing design: One of the main arguments against it was that designers weren't sure if people would be ok with sitting towards the center of the plane. The thought was that passengers wouldn't be comfortable without being able to at least see outside (even a little, looking at you 3/4/3 widebody planes). I mention this b/c there is a quote in Mary Roach's Flying to Mars. She m…

My understanding is that having to manufacture a different rib for each station along the structure is a significant challenge. It's possibly less of an issue with composites?

Re: Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

#22

Post by blamazon »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #19
alexpotato wrote: post #5

Interesting historical note on the blended wing design: One of the main arguments against it was that designers weren't sure if people would be ok with sitting towards the center of the plane. The thought was that passengers wouldn't be comfortable without being able to at least see outside (even a little, looking at you 3/4/3 widebody planes). I mention this b/c there is a quote in Mary Roach's Flying to Mars. She m…

Anecdotally, I hate flying if I can't see out the window. Like, really really hate it.

My experience as a frequent flyer is that First Class is the most likely cabin to have all windows closed for 100% of the flight. It's baffling to me, people will even keep closed the window facing New York on the approach to LaGuardia which should be a crime. Also Boston, Salt Lake, Hawaii, and really pretty much all places except like Dallas and Cleveland types totally perplex me when the window is closed and I'm not directly next to it. I want to witness this glorious rock from above!

Re: Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

#23

Post by chrisBob »

nicktelford wrote: post #15
alexpotato wrote: post #5

Interesting historical note on the blended wing design: One of the main arguments against it was that designers weren't sure if people would be ok with sitting towards the center of the plane. The thought was that passengers wouldn't be comfortable without being able to at least see outside (even a little, looking at you 3/4/3 widebody planes). I mention this b/c there is a quote in Mary Roach's Flying to Mars. She m…

A bigger problem with blended wing designs is actually for the people on the peripheral. When the plane banks, passengers further from the axis of rotation will feel a more significant change in their altitude. You literally feel like you're "falling", as the plane banks to your side. This also applies to existing aircraft, but the amount you drop/rise is limited by the your distance from the axis of rotation, which…

The issue isn't the bank angle exactly, it is the acceleration of the roll. Pilots will need to be careful not to throw people or drinks around, but I think it would be doable.

Re: Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

#24

Post by codesnik »

nicktelford wrote: post #15
alexpotato wrote: post #5

Interesting historical note on the blended wing design: One of the main arguments against it was that designers weren't sure if people would be ok with sitting towards the center of the plane. The thought was that passengers wouldn't be comfortable without being able to at least see outside (even a little, looking at you 3/4/3 widebody planes). I mention this b/c there is a quote in Mary Roach's Flying to Mars. She m…

A bigger problem with blended wing designs is actually for the people on the peripheral. When the plane banks, passengers further from the axis of rotation will feel a more significant change in their altitude. You literally feel like you're "falling", as the plane banks to your side. This also applies to existing aircraft, but the amount you drop/rise is limited by the your distance from the axis of rotation, which…

they don't have to be shallower, just bank angle increase should be slower than usual.

Re: Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

#25

Post by willnonya »

FriedPickles wrote: post #14
camillomiller wrote: post #8

Call me when they've solved seats in such planes. If you put them in a central "barrel" like in a current plane it would be a bad use of the available space. Yet you can't do otherwise. Because of the heavy banking when the plane turns, you can't seat people far away from the central axis and closer to the side edges of the V shape.

Interesting point. Cargo and fuel should be placed on the far sides. Passengers towards the center, perhaps on two levels. Routes could be adjusted to decrease typical bank angles. Makes me wonder if we'll have cargo-only planes that converge on a different optimum. In full autonomous mode, comfort is not a factor and reliability can also be relaxed. Of course, we'd lose the flexibility of being able to convert the p…

Why would reliability be relaxed? Other than just being silly on the face of it reliability is still important in cargo. It's even more important in the perception of aviation.

Re: Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

#26

Post by scarier »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #21
alexpotato wrote: post #5

Interesting historical note on the blended wing design: One of the main arguments against it was that designers weren't sure if people would be ok with sitting towards the center of the plane. The thought was that passengers wouldn't be comfortable without being able to at least see outside (even a little, looking at you 3/4/3 widebody planes). I mention this b/c there is a quote in Mary Roach's Flying to Mars. She m…

My understanding is that having to manufacture a different rib for each station along the structure is a significant challenge. It's possibly less of an issue with composites?

The differences in ribs across the span of a wing are much less of an issue than compound curvature in the wing skins—this is where composite manufacturing really shines, because you can mold them into arbitrary shapes.

Re: Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

#27

Post by strongpigeon »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #16
alexpotato wrote: post #5

Interesting historical note on the blended wing design: One of the main arguments against it was that designers weren't sure if people would be ok with sitting towards the center of the plane. The thought was that passengers wouldn't be comfortable without being able to at least see outside (even a little, looking at you 3/4/3 widebody planes). I mention this b/c there is a quote in Mary Roach's Flying to Mars. She m…

The main argument against it is that it increases fuel consumption. Plowing your cargo area through the air sideways is just idiotic. There is some crazy public belief that it is more fuel efficient because the public doesn’t understand physics. These things keep getting getting publicity because even Hacker News folks don’t get it. Long high aspect ratio wings and streamlined body are how you get fuel efficiency. Th…

You seem knowledgeable about this. Do you mind expanding on why these aren’t more efficient?

Re: Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

#28

Post by horsawlarway »

blamazon wrote: post #22
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I hate flying if I can't see out the window. Like, really really hate it.

My experience as a frequent flyer is that First Class is the most likely cabin to have all windows closed for 100% of the flight. It's baffling to me, people will even keep closed the window facing New York on the approach to LaGuardia which should be a crime. Also Boston, Salt Lake, Hawaii, and really pretty much all places except like Dallas and Cleveland types totally perplex me when the window is closed and I'm n…

I see this more and more everywhere across the plane these days.

I remember flying as a kid/teen and nearly every window was open during takeoff and touchdown. Last 3 to 5 years and almost every flight has had less than 10% of the windows open. I don't get it - I also want to see it. We're fucking flying, for god's sake.

Re: Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

#29

Post by kridsdale2 »

nervousvarun wrote: post #12
alexpotato wrote: post #5

Interesting historical note on the blended wing design: One of the main arguments against it was that designers weren't sure if people would be ok with sitting towards the center of the plane. The thought was that passengers wouldn't be comfortable without being able to at least see outside (even a little, looking at you 3/4/3 widebody planes). I mention this b/c there is a quote in Mary Roach's Flying to Mars. She m…

This "problem" goes away if you just have one of the feeds in the seat-back entertainment system be a wing mounted camera view no?

Maybe if you had it in stereo 3D and gave the passengers a VR display.

Re: Engineers are exploring radical new designs for commercial planes

#30

Post by hotpotamus »

AlexandrB wrote: post #7
ramesh31 wrote: post #4

I remember seeing renderings precisely like this in my middle school textbooks in the 90s, claiming the same thing. The truth is that commercial airliners are a solved engineering problem. We are at the absolute limits for speed, reliability, and safety that can be achieved with a flying machine in the earth’s atmosphere. Which is why the fundamental layout has not changed since the 707 was introduced over 60 years a…

Yup, I've been seeing these futuristic airplane concepts for most of my life, but commercial airframes seem to be converging to be more and more similar. Unusual elements like a third engine in the tail or horizontal stabilizers mounted above the rudder have largely disappeared. Given the thin margins in air travel, I suspect this is because this design is the most successful. It might be a local minimum, but when it…

My understanding is that tri-engine jetliners were actually more to fulfill a regulation than for engineering reasons. There are regulatory limits to how far a plane is allowed to fly on one engine called ETOPS - I forget what it really stands for, but the colloquial expression is: Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim. It used to be limited to around 2 hours I believe, meaning you've got a bit of time to divert and make an emergency landing. But if you're crossing the ocean, it's not really possible, so for a long time if you were crossing an ocean, you needed a 3 or 4 engined plane to do it.

Jet engines are extremely reliable however, they fail on the order of several hundred times less often than piston engines, and are very well proven and have basically only improved, and so ETOPS rules have been relaxed quite a bit meaning that a lot more ocean crossing routes are available to twinjets.

Post reply on HN