A very interesting concept.
It looks like a giant lawn mower, the old fashioned reel mowers.
If they do not hit some unexpected problems scaling it up to carry actual people and loads, it might provide some competition for the helicopter market. I do not see it being installed on large jet liners. I am not sure how many extra moving parts one really wants to put on large, fast aircraft. (And I do not see that wing working at high speeds.)
I suppose that there is nothing inherently scarier about a fan wing than about swinging the wing around over one’s head as a helicopter does, but the need to keep multiple very long pieces of wing in constant motion despite rain, dust, ice, and birds does not give me a warm feeling about the overall usefulness of the design.
Crop dusters and UAVs used for photo recon would certainly benefit from some of the design features. (I doubt that there will ever be a stealth fan wing.)
Your question can have no factual answer, just conjecture, so it really belongs in IMHO. You may suggest to a mod that it be moved.
That said… I don’t think it has much of a future. The fan is a large but delicate structure that requires fairly precise alignment with the wing. Not such a big problem in a model but I think a full size plane. They talk about the scalability of power requirements but I don’t think they’ve considered the scalability of the structure. An ultrlight size fanwing might be difficult to build so it is both sufficiently strong yet light enough to fly. Makes me think of that old clip of the venetian blind airplane collapsing on itself.
Blended-wing-body aircraft will be the next “big thing,” I think.
This article says we’ll be seeing real world application in just a few years, maybe this decade.
Moved to IMHO.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
Looks and sounds interesting, especially the part about being cheaper to operate, which I take to be an issue of greater fuel efficiency.
However, I suspect that whichever big aircraft manufacturer(s) is still left standing won’t view this upstart benignly. The fact that its apparent applications do not seem to challenge traditional fixed-wing aircraft will be irrelevant, if some senior executive starts feeling paranoid. Ever wonder why we hear so little about Bert Rutan?? Until he got the private funding to compete for the X-prize, that is (and I am one of the many who devoutly hope that he - or someone, anyone - will manage to build private space capability).
I am strongly of the opinion that commercial flight will become drastically more expensive in the not too distant future, with the current estimates of petroleum reserves. So the situation is extremely murky, IMO. In theory, that gives new ideas and developments a better chance. But I think the chances for this particular form of flight machine will depend more on how determined the creators are, and how much capital is available to them.
I point to other experiments in process, frex NoClueBoy’s links to Boeing’s under-development reshaping of the airframe. Does anyone doubt that an idea that is presented by Boeing will automatically receive more attention/approval than an idea by Joe (Genius) Blow, who is not a part of the industry?
Sad, but that’s how it is in our crapitalistic society, where the biggest “private” corporations use the bureaucracy to lock us in to modes of consumption that are less than beneficial. Of course, nobody’s said what’s going to happen when the fuel is so expensive that tickets are out of range for “pleasure” travel.
(Am I feeling a bit paranoid today? I didn’t think so, until I reread what I wrote.) :wally
I don’t think the concept is very new, perhaps the application. This is one way to model lift for a wing, IIRC. A fun demonstration of this concept is to take a white ball-point pen barrel - the kind where you can remove the top and bottom leaving only a hollow, smooth plastic tube (Bic, I think). Place the tube near the edge of a table and press your fingers down on the tube as though you are pressing really hard on the asdf jkl; home row on your keyboard. Push hard enough and roll your fingers back slightly and the barrel should fly forward several yards in fairly stable flight, like a wing. Might take a couple tries, because you’re trying to get it to fly forward, but with a backward rotation about the long axis.
Oh FOO!
I had a long dissertation all ready to go and them my computer coughed!
Anyhow - rather than do all that again right now I’ll just say that in aviation size DOES matter. I won’t take this seriously as anything other than a model aircraft propulsion system until they have a full-size prototype actually flying.
Some of their proposed applications just don’t make sense to me, some of them make a lot of sense.
I’m glad they ARE thinking about certain issues like icing, bird strikes, and so forth. They also mention autorotation and power-off glide, although their use of the term “angle of attack” when I think they mean “angle of approach” doesn’t reassure me much. In any case, that thing in it’s present form looks to have the glide profile of a brick. That’s not necessarially a show-stopper - as an example, helicoptors don’t glide at all but we still use 'em. Unlike a rotorcraft, though, I think you could hang a ballistic recovery parachute off one of these. (Although last I heard those were banned in the UK due to come unfornate fatal accidents on the gorund).
It’s a new idea and I think it has some potential, but it may be practical only in very limited areas. On the other hand, niche aircraft do exist and play valuable roles in the modern world.
I don’t think it’s going to replace either fixed wing aircraft or helicoptors, though.
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- Nothing is likely to unseat the helicopter as the main type of VTOL aircraft just because helicopter engineering is well understood, and it is not likely that any aerofoil-based lifting system with comparable performance (that is, cruising speeds) and significantly greater efficiency will be found. The fanwing fails on the “unfamiliar engineering” and “cruising speeds” parts of the test.
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- Nothing is likely to unseat the helicopter as the main type of VTOL aircraft just because helicopter engineering is well understood, and it is not likely that any aerofoil-based lifting system with comparable performance (that is, cruising speeds) and significantly greater efficiency will be found. The fanwing fails on the “unfamiliar engineering” and “cruising speeds” parts of the test.
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- For that matter, if you wanted a heavy-lift, slow-speed aircraft, why not just use a blimp or dirigible and really save fuel? Well, there are people who thing doing just that is a great idea–but the fact remains that there is a rather large gulf between the financial demand for such aircraft, and what these aircraft cost to build and operate.
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Besides speculation, is there anything new on the projects hoping to create hydrogen fuel cell engines for aircraft? Kind of hard to wade thru all the white noise a search pulls up for me.
Count me as a skeptic. Aside from foreign object damage, icing, and other problems already mentioned, I’d also wonder about stability and control. Again, it might work well scaled down to model size, but at full size you’re talking about a hell of a lot of rotating mass. What kind of stresses will there be on that thing in a turn? How manoeverable will it be? If it uses ailerons, how does aileron response vary with engine speed?
Then there’s glide performance. Show me one of those models landing safely after the engine is shut down. The way it’s designed it looks to me like a brick with the power off.
Finally, it looks like this is really a very slow speed aircraft. I wonder how fast they can make it go?
We could have had these years ago if airline execs didn’t think everyone wanted window seats. If they realized they could have saved fuel costs, and that everyone would be watching their own DVDs anyway, several airlines might still be in business. 
Hey, man, I *want * my window seat!
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- Maybe if you ask nice they’ll put windows in the floor.
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- Maybe if you ask nice they’ll put windows in the floor.
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- Seriously, part of the problem with getting blended-wing aircraft accepted for passenger use has nothing to do with passengers: it’s that a blended-wing aircraft has a significantly larger wingspan than a conventional jet, and so (in design planning stages) they usually can’t occupy all the boarding gates at an airport at the same time–because the boarding gates have been laid out to accommodate conventionally-designed and -sized aircraft.
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- Seriously, part of the problem with getting blended-wing aircraft accepted for passenger use has nothing to do with passengers: it’s that a blended-wing aircraft has a significantly larger wingspan than a conventional jet, and so (in design planning stages) they usually can’t occupy all the boarding gates at an airport at the same time–because the boarding gates have been laid out to accommodate conventionally-designed and -sized aircraft.
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If they can’t make a website that works in Mozilla, I doubt they’ll make a successful commerical airplane
I use mozilla 1.7.1.
It works for me.
1.8 RC2 here - very strange. Maybe it’s not the site at fault 