Good luck convincing Qantas that they wouldn’t just keep returning to the airport.
The no-separation-between-fuel-tanks-and-passengers has me a little concerned. Seems like the chances of an otherwise nonfatal crash to become fatal would go way up.
This! Very much this.
I am NOT flying on one of those if any of the current Flying V users are in charge!
(Possible exception for Bruce Dickinson even though he is a singer rather than a guitarist - but at least he knows how to fly an airliner!
NB John Travolta does not count.)
Passenger riding in the wings? This cat got there FIRST.
They’d need side thrusters?
Seriously, though, I’d hazard a guess it might be something to do with structural stresses and/or rudder-induced yawing automatically creating banking motion which it would be fuel inefficient to counter. But I am not an aviation expert!!
… and then I found this (which does not address stresses) from NASA - for schoolkids - but it does say rudder makes it yaw
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/yaw.html
Drag, aerodynamics. The plane is pushing air out of the way as it moves forward. If you can keep the cross-sectional area of the plane constant, or at least closer to constant there will be less drag.
So a regular airplane, the initial work of pushing air out of the way is at the nose, then its all clear sailing till the air reaches the wings - OUCH! So much new area to push air out of the way…
Now look at the V design. Once you get past the nose, the profile of the two legs of the V are the same all the way back, because there is nothing filling in the V. No change in cross section, no increase in drag.
Look at some early supersonic jets - they had what was called a “coke-bottle” design, where the body necked down and got skinny in the same place the wing was the widest. This could reduce air pressure enough to let them break the sound barrier.
OMG - had to fast forward for the happy ending.
Though to be fair, if the cat didn’t have this on its tail, it isn’t really the pilots fault.
I might pay extra for the “enhanced-motion” seats!
I’m used to flying space ships in Elite Dangerous. They have 6DOF in maneuvering thrusters as well as pitch roll and yaw. So I have no feel for what a plane does.
Anything but the 737 Max!
Sure! But, 40 years ago, I was certain I’d be taking one to work today.
How about Brian May?
Only if he builds it.
Are you OK with foxes and badgers along for the ride?
Ah - had forgotten about him. (Cue umpteen others being suggested.)
But he winds hs own pickups, FFS! Come on, you really want that level of ‘personalisation’ in a flying machine?
Was going to wonder if he actually played a Flying V, but Google was my friend.
- Crappy video, and ancient as hell, Flying V action starts at 59 seconds.
2. A picture and a fact:
ETA @GutRot - no - quite the opposite!
It does raise the issue, though, that the wingspan is about halfway back on the A350, not all up front where it wouldn’t fit among the ground equipment/infrastructure. Maybe they’ve allowed for this, but still, even the narrow part of the wedge is wider than the front of a present-day fuselage. (It’s why, I imagine, they’d also have trouble with canards, assuming those have some kind of advantage (outside of politics)).
Surely they’ve allowed for it, as you say.
(And the canard is most likely a red herring!)
(Ducks and gets his coat.)
If the fuel goes up, I’m not sure that ‘otherwise nonfatal’ obtains.
Or as we called them in the good old days. Inherently unstable.
How about we bring back my favorite weird craft, the Ekranoplan