KLM funds new "Flying-V" plane design where passengers sit inside the wings

Typically, flying wings and lifting bodies are less stable in pitch(rocking back and forth). In a conventional aircraft, the tail and its control surfaces are further from the center of gravity and so exert more force.

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The cat kinda looks like it has done this before.

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Can’t we pull a few of these out of mothballs?

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The chemical energy starst out as hydrogen from electrolysis of water, this step use a lot of electricity. They extract CO2 from seawater and start to build up heavier molecules from CO2 + H2.

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Cargo does not get airsick, or require quick evacuation. This plane should be painted brown, with a “UPS” logo. And no windows.

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Currently serving in the Iranian Navy.

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Apparently Boeing was considering it:

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I’m sure they stole the idea from the airliners in Fallout 4; those things (or at least, the wreckage of them) had seats in the wings like that.

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Well, we’ve been using hydrogen as a rocket fuel since… 1961, I think? When Pratt & Whitney first introduced the RL-10 upper-stage engine. (Which is still in widespread use today.)

The upper stages of the Saturn I, IB, and V, the primary sustainers of the Space Shuttle and the upcoming SLS, and all stages - boosters, primary, and upper - of the Delta IV are powered by hydrogen.

So we do know a little bit about keeping it contained as a bulk aerospace fuel. (-:

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Yaw:
you don’t want to flat-turn (or use yaw) because the inside wing (and especially the areas towards the tip of the inside wing) travels a lot slower than it should be, and gets closer and closer to the stall speed, at which point a whole bunch of bad things suddenly happen very quickly. Banking in turns means that the speed of air over the wings doesn’t really change much.

Weight at the wing tips:
Ironically (or unexpectedly) you actually want to put lots of weight out at the tips if you can. On the ground the wings of a plane droop because of gravity. However in flight the wings want to go up (i.e., ‘lift’) because of aerodynamic forces, while the body wants to go down because it isn’t a lifting body and it’s heavy. That’s why you can see the wings curving upwards towards the tips while you’re in flight. That means that the shape and airflow across the wings changes depending on how fast the a/c is going, it’s altitude, air density, etc. You can design around that, but it’s a complex PITA, and always results in compromises. On the other hand, if you make the wingtips heavy then gravity will hold them down while the aerodynamic forces are trying to force them up, leading to a ‘flatter’ wing that’s easier to design for efficiency across multiple parts of the flight envelope.


Notice the dolly wheels out near the wing tips to stop them drooping too much.

Those wingtip fuel tanks are kind of a cheat, because it’s easier to slap on an external fuel tank than it is to design an internal space to hold the same amount of fuel, but there’s a also reason those tanks are located out at the tips, rather than somewhere else on the plane.

The point here is that, in an ideal world, you’d want all the dense cargo out at the wingtips, and all the bulky cargo nearer the centre line. Cargo here includes passengers, fuel, luggage, etc. Anything that isn’t permanently attached to the aircraft.

B737 MAX:
MCAS isn’t really an efficiency measure. It was originally conceived as an aid to the pilot in extreme flight conditions, and was reasonably well designed for that use case. The reason it went bad is that the use case envelope was expanded, so the original two separate sensor input system was dropped to be a single sensor input so it could be used over a wider part of the flight envelope. Having a single sensor control anything safety-critical is generally a terrible idea, which is why you should be skeptical of Boeing’s proposed software-only ‘fix’ - there’ll still be just the one sensor feeding MCAS.

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Just a guess, but I figure that the passenger windows – actually being part of the wing’s leading edge – would have to be of a design significantly different from what’s on conventional a/c: Ideally, the windows would likely need to be perfectly conformal to the wing structure… and (based on passenger jet cockpit noise) somehow have greater noise isolation since the onrushing air would more greatly impact (rather than slide by) the windows. Then there’s the concern of birds directly impacting those now in-the-wind windows. This will be very interesting!

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Offspring of the Caspian Sea Monster! It’s a boy!

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Compelling! I notice that only one of the ten Delta IV launches was deemed a partial failure due to its fuel system. A success rate of 90% is pretty good by any standard, don’t you think? Not nearly as many successful flights as the Hindenburg, of course, but slightly fewer catastrophic failures.

/kidding

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Yeah, but only half of one percent of those sensors have been found to be faulty, so far. What are you so worried about?

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Apparently, Bruce Peterson didn’t much care for it, either. )-:

He was seriously injured and lost sight in one eye due to an in-hospital infection. He wasn’t very happy about having the accident replayed over and over on TV.

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(-:

BTW, the single D-IV (partial) failure was the result of cavitation in the LOX lines fooling sensors into thinking the LOX had run out. Nothing to do with the hydrogen. (-:

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Or the outer wing tip might just go supersonic, another thing you don’t want to happen. IIRC, this was something the U2 pilots had to look out for.

Besides, the radius of turn would be enormous, you’d need much more room for flight paths. Some airports would be very hard to approach at all, I think.

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Ralph Richardson did a damn good Mussolini, almost as good as Donald Trump, the current champion Mussolini impersonator.

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He is so wonderful as “The Boss” :smiley: You know that things have gone really bad when even Ralph Richardson has become a warlord :smiley:

On a tangent, I think I’ll have a look for “Went the Day Well?” on line. Another classic anti-war movie.