- MUNICH (Reuters) - Boeing
Co engineers have designed a super-efficient aircraft that would look like
a giant bat and slash the cost of air transport.
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- The "Blended Wing Body" concept, outlined more
than 10 years ago but now said to be almost perfected, would have no fuselage
or tail. Rather, it would basically be a wing with a belly that would accommodate
the passengers and freight.
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- The secret to its design, described by project head Robert
Liebeck this week, is that the whole structure of the aircraft would work
to generate lift.
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- The accommodation section in a normal plane, the tubular
fuselage, is a burden that generates extra drag -- so the Blended Wing
Body (BWB) does not have one.
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- "Creation of the...BWB was motivated by a search
for an airplane configuration that could offer improved efficiency over
the classic tube and wing," the conventional configuration, Liebeck
wrote in a paper presented to a seminar in Munich this week.
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- The current standard airliner configuration, now more
than 50 years old, comes from the B-47 bomber that Boeing built for the
U.S. Air Force early in the Cold War.
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- Among its advantages, the fuselage is fairly light, because
its tubular shape is ideal for withstanding the pressurization that passengers
need when they fly at high altitudes.
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- LESS FUEL, POLLUTION, NOISE
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- The BWB's designers tried to find out what advantages
they could get if they did without that tube and instead gave the wing
a fat middle section for accommodation.
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- The results were astonishing.
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- Boeing calculates that a BWB seating 480 passengers would
use 32 percent less fuel than the proposed A380-700 from Airbus, the main
business unit of European aerospace group EADS.
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- The plane would weigh 19 percent less, suggesting that
it would cost less to build. And it would need 19 percent less thrust,
saving on engine manufacturing and maintenance costs.
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- Needing less thrust, the aircraft would emit less pollution.
And it would a lot be quieter, Boeing's research suggests.
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- Its shape could also give it a little more speed than
normal jet airliners have.
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- A ROOM WITH NO VIEW
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- So if the BWB is so good, why hasn't Boeing built it?
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- One answer is that the company has been solving some
of the problems that the new shape would present, such as how to evacuate
it in an emergency.
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- It also has one potentially serious drawback: almost
no passenger would have a window.
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- The accommodation section would be wide, rather than
long, with passengers sitting in a series of side-by-side rooms largely
sealed off from the outside.
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- "The primary issue we really have to get comfortable
with is the passenger-acceptance factor," Leibeck told the Munich-based
Institute for Flight and Aerospace.
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- The obvious answer is to fit big television screens showing
what is going on outside, making every seat a window seat.
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- Some engineers and industry analysts think even that
would be unnecessary. Passengers sitting in the middle seats of current
wide-body airliners already have little view of the outside, and few people
complain when the cabin attendants close the window shutters at night.
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