Faster than the speed of SOUND: Nasa?s radical future plan for planes | Travel News | Travel | Daily Express This from the article The Virginia-based developers are confident the radical new design will be a fully fledged flight service by 2027. Fuel efficiency will be increased more than 50 per cent on the new planes compared to the best-in-class aircraft currently available. To put that in perspective, the D8 would use 2,095 gallons of fuel less than the most efficient planes in the air at the moment, on a flight from LA to New York (2,475 miles). The model was inspired by the Boeing 707 from 1958, which opened the door to world travel in the space of a day. Image Unavailable, Please Login
Hmmmm. Also, while the efficiency targets sound great, I'm not crazy about the idea of having both engines side-by-side, buried in the middle of the empannage.
This isn't going supersonic at 528 mph.... NASA is really good a throwing out "goals" and "concepts" and when you look closely at the assumptions they have often added things like "unobtainum" into the engines to get higher temperatures than are realistic, or are making the structure out of something that isn't real yet... I rather doubt that the capability to reduce fuel consumption by 50%, compared to what is flying today (787) is anywhere near achievable without injections of technology that would, if applied to current aircraft, bring big improvements to them too. Or they'll do other things like fly a lot higher (easy gains), but not realistic from a safety standpoint if you lost cabin pressure.. The design and development of aircraft is a very competitive business. If it was that easy to get a 50% improvement in fuel efficiency AB or Boeing would have done it a long time ago.
