Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: where smart happens him Marshall Brain with today's question, what
Speaker 1: are airplanes in going to look like in the United States?
Speaker 1: If you think about the airplanes that are flying in
Speaker 1: the United States today, they all look pretty much the same.
Speaker 1: If you think about a seven thirty seven or a
Speaker 1: seven forty seven, or a seven fifty seven or a
Speaker 1: d C ten, it's pretty much a big aluminum tube
Speaker 1: with two wings sticking out of it and a tail.
Speaker 1: All airplanes have looked like this pretty much since World
Speaker 1: War Two for a couple of different reasons, but the
Speaker 1: main reason is because this is a very easy design
Speaker 1: to manufacture and aluminum. In order to shake up the
Speaker 1: design world a little bit and get people thinking in
Speaker 1: different ways about new aircraft, NaSTA has been working with
Speaker 1: the big aircraft ARAFT manufacturers on a set of new
Speaker 1: designs for the year. The most important goal that NASA
Speaker 1: is pushing in these new designs is much better fuel economy.
Speaker 1: NASA has set an incredibly aggressive goal of reducing fuel
Speaker 1: consumption by se in the new airplanes. That's great for
Speaker 1: the environment, but it's also great for consumers because when
Speaker 1: you buy a ticket on an airplane. The main thing
Speaker 1: that's controlling the cost of that ticket is the cost
Speaker 1: of the fuel. NASA has some other goals, like much
Speaker 1: cleaner exhaust and lower noise production. In addition, NASA wants
Speaker 1: these airplanes to not be too radical. They have to
Speaker 1: fit into the existing air traffic control structure, and they
Speaker 1: have to be able to land and take off at
Speaker 1: the existing airports and also fit into the airport gate structure.
Speaker 1: If NASA made too radical a change and you had
Speaker 1: to retrofit all the airports in the United States or
Speaker 1: make the runways longer, something like that, it would probably
Speaker 1: be too expensive to carry off. So NASA has chosen
Speaker 1: three designs, and they've awarded contracts to three of the
Speaker 1: big aircraft manufacturers, Boeing, lockeed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. By
Speaker 1: looking at these three designs, we can see what NASA
Speaker 1: is thinking. The least radical of the three designs is
Speaker 1: the one that lockeed Martin is building. It looks pretty
Speaker 1: much like any airplane that we see today. It's a
Speaker 1: tube with two wings, but the engines have been reduced
Speaker 1: to one and they've been moved to the very back
Speaker 1: of the plane. The idea here is to use something
Speaker 1: called boundary layer ingestion, taking slower moving air off the
Speaker 1: back of the fuselage and running it through the engine
Speaker 1: to produce thrust. That step alone could produce some pretty
Speaker 1: amazing fuel savings, and by putting the engine up on
Speaker 1: top of the fuselage, you lower noise quite a bit.
Speaker 1: Northrop Grumman's design looks a lot more radical, but uses
Speaker 1: the same basic manufacturing infrastructure that's available today. In this design,
Speaker 1: and the plane has not one but two fuselages hanging
Speaker 1: side by side under the wings. The idea is that
Speaker 1: a fuselage doesn't really add that much extra drag, but
Speaker 1: you can get a lot more passengers on the plane,
Speaker 1: so you increase the fuel economy per passenger quite a bit.
Speaker 1: M I. T did some research around this idea and
Speaker 1: they came up with something they called the double bubble fuselage,
Speaker 1: where the two fuselages are actually blended together in the
Speaker 1: middle of the airplane. And then they put the boundary
Speaker 1: layer and gestion engines on the back of the plane
Speaker 1: as well, and this gave some pretty remarkable improvements in
Speaker 1: fuel economy and noise reduction. And then Boeing's airplane is
Speaker 1: the most radical design, it's a giant blended wing approach.
Speaker 1: Instead of using a tube with wings approach that's so
Speaker 1: universal today, a blended wing aircraft blends the wings and
Speaker 1: the fuselage together. The B two Bomber is the best
Speaker 1: example of a blended wing approach that's in use today.
Speaker 1: Since the fuselage is no longer a tube, it can
Speaker 1: be much much wider. There could be a dozen or
Speaker 1: more rows of seats inside of one of these airplanes,
Speaker 1: and that could increase passenger capacity quite a bit. In
Speaker 1: Boeing's designed the engines are also up on top and
Speaker 1: in the back of the fuselage to get the boundary
Speaker 1: layer ingestion effect and also to reduce noise. Boeing already
Speaker 1: has a scale model of this approach flying. It's called
Speaker 1: the X forty eight, and the results have been pretty
Speaker 1: good so far. The big question here is can the
Speaker 1: manufacturing of this type of airplane be perfected. Boeing has
Speaker 1: had so much trouble building the seven eight seven, also
Speaker 1: known as the Dream Lighter, out of carbon fiber, that
Speaker 1: is just not clear that a really radical design like
Speaker 1: a blended wing can be manufactured inexpensively and at high volume.
Speaker 1: So that's NASA's lineup for It'll be interesting to see
Speaker 1: if any of these things actually start flying fifth ten
Speaker 1: years from now, and if we board airplanes like this
Speaker 1: when we go to the airport. For more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, doesn't how stuff works dot
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