The future of flight begins, say some experts, with the rapid changes now taking place in the world of cars and trucks. Companies such as Uber and Google appear poised to revolutionize how people and cargo move around in the world. These players and any number of others—from Tesla to Apple—all are staking out front-row seats for the big show, reportedly anywhere from two to 10 years in the future, when self-driving cars are ready for the consumer marketplace.
Missy Cummings, one of the U.S. Navy’s first female fighter pilots and now an aviation industry expert at Duke University, says the future of personal flight may be a mash-up of unmanned aerial drones along with the Uber business model and driverless cars. “The skill set for the future operator of a flying car will be simply knowing how to operate a smartphone,” Cummings writes in a recent issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology devoted to the future of flight. Hello, George Jetson! But even in a world that brings all of Cummings’ bold predictions to pass, such innovations appear to be the domain of local transportation.
The key question is: How fast will commercial aircraft of the future travel? In 1976, the Concorde promised to shrink the globe with supersonic flights between New York and London in 3.5 hours. What futurists could not predict at the time, however, was the public outcry at the jet’s sonic booms. Up to 45 percent of residents in some communities outside of Washington, D.C., reported being “very annoyed” at the cupboard-rattling thunder they endured on a daily basis after Concorde began flying to nearby Dulles International Airport.
That backlash plus the Concorde’s high cost of operation and fuel-guzzling inefficiency spelled the end of the jet: Concorde logged its final flight in 2003. Yet researchers from NASA to Boeing all are aiming for a post-Concorde future of quieter and more environmentally friendly supersonic flight.
Boeing developed the X-51A WaveRider, an unmanned vehicle that relied on its own shock waves for compression lift and set a record in 2013 for longest air-breathing propelled flight at hypersonic speed. The company hopes to apply that technology, eventually, toward a reusable space plane for consumer use. Meanwhile, Airbus, according to patents filed last year, has developed an aircraft that could travel at speeds up to 4.5 times the speed of sound—which would zip passengers from New York to London in just an hour. What is still unclear from the patent filings is how loud or disrupting this new craft’s sonic boom would be.
NASA researchers are tackling the sonic boom problem head on in their Quiet Supersonic Technology project. According to Peter Coen, NASA’s commercial supersonic technology project manager at Langley Research Center in Virginia, QueSST’s concept “takes the sonic boom and turns it into something more like a sonic thump.” Thanks to modern, high-speed computer-aided design and simulation, Coen’s team has tweaked the traditional airplane design to cancel some of the highest pressure sound waves coming off the airplane as it travels faster than the speed of sound. Sort of like the out-of-phase sounds generated in noise-cancelling headphones, the shock waves emanating from QueSST’s surfaces have been carefully designed to partly cancel each other out when heard from the ground.
“We’re trying to control how the shock waves interact,” Coen says. “We take out all the high frequency noise that’s associated with the crack of the sonic boom. We’re doing some acoustic engineering . . . to create a rounded, soft-pressure distribution as opposed to a rapid-pressure increase.”
Coen says the experimental QueSST aircraft is designed to fly at 1.4 times the speed of sound, just beneath Concorde’s Mach 2. The technology could eventually be applied to larger commercial aircraft that would drink but not gulp fuel—as gas-guzzler Concorde famously did. And if they prove to be as quiet as designed, supersonic planes could also open up many more air routes to civilian supersonic travel, compared to Concorde’s limited transoceanic routes.
Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner may be the best sneak preview of technologies on the horizon for next-generation commercial aircraft. The sleek jetliner is more fuel efficient than early jet aircraft (such as its distant cousin the 707), requiring 20 to 25 percent less fuel, and it is much quieter. Dreamliner’s airframe is only 10 percent steel and 20 percent aluminum; half of its bulk is actually made up of advanced composite materials such as carbon fiber reinforced plastic.
The converging trends of lighter and stronger materials are leading to greater fuel efficiency. And as with NASA’s advanced QueSST design, more powerful computer-aided design and simulation tools enable engineers to design quieter aircraft, too. Some NASA studies, for instance, have shown noise reductions when engines are mounted above rather than below the wing.
Perhaps the biggest unsolved question right now is how airplanes of the future will be fueled. Next-generation batteries like the kinds found in electric cars don’t have the energy density needed to power transcontinental flight. As Boeing’s chief technology officer, John J. Tracy, told Aviation Week & Space Technology, “The fuels we have today are very efficient, but if we can get to other forms of energy storage—whether batteries, supercapacitors, flywheels or even more advanced things—then I’d think we’ll go to the next step in terms of radical efficiency improvements and zero emissions. Safe hydrogen storage would be another one.”
Airbus’ recent patent filing on its hypersonic concept plane, for instance, used hydrogen for its fuel. But as the Hindenburg disaster reminds us, hydrogen is also an extremely volatile substance that has to date proven less than ideal for air travel.
According to Steven Barrett, associate professor and director of the Laboratory for Aviation and Environment at MIT, today’s traditional petroleum-derived Jet A fuel is hard to beat. “Jet A will play a major role for decades to come even if we have advances in batteries,” he says. For starters, he says, an airplane once in service will typically live out a lifespan in decades of service—not the five to eight years of a typical car or SUV. So the fuel of current-generation aircraft, in other words, appears to be here for some time to come.
Still, “there’s a lot of scope for innovation,” Barrett says. “Biofuels look really good environmentally, but the capital expenditure of [making the fuels] is so high that if somebody could figure out a way of modifying the process or inventing a way of doing it much cheaper, that could make biofuels much more competitive.”
In fact, this May a team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced that they’d taken a significant step toward doing exactly that. Reporting in the journal Green Chemistry, they engineered a strain of E. coli bacteria that simplifies the process of converting plant-derived cellulose (in this case, a common North American perennial called switchgrass) into a hydrocarbon that’s also a precursor to Jet A. The ultimate goal would be to put simple plant matter into a vat, walk away and with the right catalysts and bacteria, extract the jet fuel.
“Ultimately, we at [Joint BioEnergy Institute] hope to develop processes that are robust and simple where one can directly convert any renewable plant material to a final fuel in a single pot,” says study principal investigator Aindrila Mukhopadhyay. “This study puts us one step closer to this moon shot.”
Writing in Aviation Week & Space Technology, entrepreneur and Ansari XPRIZE winner Burt Rutan wrote that moon shots are the right frame of mind to think about the future of flight: “We must strive to nurture in our children the curiosity, creativity and courage that took us to the moon,” he said, wondering “what the new breakthroughs will look like. We don’t know. We didn’t know what the internet, GPS and DNA looked like before they were recognized as breakthroughs. But that shouldn’t deter us.”
GO THERE
Find out more about aviation and space travel at these iconic places.
By Drew Wood
Kennedy Space Center
Cape Canaveral, Florida
Always wanted to be an astronaut but keep getting hung up on the crummy space ice cream? Then Kennedy Space Center is for you. Not only is it a veritable Disneyland of space travel—and located right next door to NASA’s primary launch facility, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station—it’s regularly home to non-NASA rocket launches. That includes some high-profile beta launches of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which, among other things, has aspirations to one day colonize Mars. MARS! Down on this colony we call Earth, Kennedy is the place to learn about the space program of today and tomorrow. To-dos include the Space Shuttle Atlantis Exhibit, complete with the actual space shuttle Atlantis, an immersive shuttle launch simulator, a variety of IMAX experiences, a look at the future of space travel at NASA Now and even the Rocket Garden: a literal garden full of retired rockets from the space program, including the Saturn 1B that was used to orbit the moon. Oh, and that’s not even the coolest part. About 500 Americans have been lucky enough to go to space, and 30 of them get to talk about it, one a day, at Kennedy via the Astronaut Encounter program. For an extra $199, you can book the Fly With An Astronaut experience and spend half a day with a space vet.
Spaceport America
Sierra County, New Mexico
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| A G-Shock trainer at Spaceport America. |
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One of these days, Richard Branson or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos (or all three) are going to see their dreams of commercial space travel realized—and before you know it, all sorts of normal people will be surfing Travelocity for good deals on round trips to Mars for spring break. And when they do? Well, they’ll need an airport . . . nay, a spaceport. Enter southern New Mexico’s Spaceport America. Sure, it’s at least a quarter century before its time, but the world’s first FAA-licensed commercial spaceport is ready and worth a visit. It’s been officially open since October 2011, and while you can’t actually book a space flight out of Spaceport America yet, it’s already a “hub” for Virgin Galactic, UP Aerospace and SpaceX, and the grounds have been open to the public for tours since 2015. Tours start at Spaceport’s visitor center in Truth or Consequences and head to its remote desert locale via buses. Once on campus, you’ll learn about the nature of commercial space travel via interactive digital kiosks, presentations and tours of the facility, which hosts both vertical space launches and horizontal space way launches.
Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum
Washington, D.C.
In 1976, the United States turned 200 and gave itself a suitably grand present: a museum to celebrate one of its greatest inventions, aeronautics. Forty years, more than 300 million visitors and countless aviation innovations later, the museum continues to evolve. The museum’s main exhibit space, Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall, contains aircraft ranging from the Spirit of St. Louis to an Apollo 11 lunar module to Captain Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1 (the first plane to break the sound barrier); it began a renovation in 2014 and is due to reopen this month. In addition to seeing artifacts and objects spanning air and space travel history—from current space travel to pre-1920s aviation—visitors can check out high-test combat plane simulators, a planetarium and an observatory. And lest you think Air and Space is only “rah-rah aviation history!”, its Moving Beyond Earth exhibit examines our recent interactions with space travel and takes you on a virtual tour of the International Space Station. If that’s not enough, the museum’s facility near Dulles Airport, the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, has thousands of additional aviation and space artifacts on display.
Red Bull Hangar-7
Salzburg, Austria
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| Inside Red Bull Hangar-7. |
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Thanks to Red Bull co-founder and adrenaline junkie Dietrich Mateschitz, Salzburg’s hills are no longer only alive with the sound of music. The dulcet tones of Julie Andrews have been drowned out by the rips and roars of the Formula 1 cars, racing motorcycles and notable aircraft that make up Red Bull’s private collection of super machines. Located on the periphery of the Salzburg Airport, Mateschitz’s fully operational collection of air and land machines resides in matching glass hangars designed to look like the airfoil wings of an aircraft. Hangar-7, the public-facing sister, is replete with two bars, a lounge and Michelin-starred Restaurant Ikarus—in addition to the aircraft and automobile gallery. Hangar-8 is the private half where the bulk of the collection is stored and maintained for regular flight and competition. The aircraft in the collection aren’t necessarily trendsetters for next-generation aviation, but they do provide solid insight into the path of flight up until now. In addition to air show speedsters like a pair of Dornier Alpha jets purchased from the German Air Force, it has a shiny silver Lockheed P-38 Lightning, the double-boomed fighter made famous by the U.S. in World War II; a Bell Cobra helicopter (think 1980’s TV show Airwolf); and the former Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito’s one-time ride, a four-engine Douglas DC-6B.
Future of Flight Aviation Center & Boeing Tour
Mukilteo, Washington
Sure, Seattle has flying fish, but just about 35 minutes north in Mukilteo, they have a flying center. And it’s pretty epic. The public-facing extension of the Institute of Flight, a nonprofit dedicated to flight research and education, the Future of Flight Aviation Center & Boeing Tour is one part factory tour, one part lessons on the history and future of aviation innovation, as seen (mostly) through the Boeing lens. If that sounds a little too Boeing, consider for a moment how important William Boeing’s once-meager airplane company has become since it filled its first order for seaplanes during World War I. From war planes to space exploration to some of the world’s most popular commercial jetliners (hellooo, 747, 777), the company has been one of the chief innovators in flight. Among the exhibits here are digital stations to design your own plane, a flight simulator that takes you to far-off places such as Egypt and to far-back moments such as the Battle of Iwo Jima, a hands-on look at the evolution of flight systems and up-close views of the engineering and science behind the latest innovations in jet propulsion and engines. When you’re done learning how planes work, you can go next door to the Boeing factory and learn how they’re built. The Guinness World Records’ largest building by volume, Boeing’s Everett facility assembles 747s, 777s and 787s (Dreamliners)—and on your 90-minute tour inside, you’ll get a chance to witness the almost inconceivable scale of the endeavor.