A whole new way to fly Airbus’ vision of the future

© AIRBUS S.A.S 2010 - All rights reserved - EIAI In its ‘Future by Airbus’ programme the plane-maker offers a vision of what the aircraft and the experience of air travel might be like by 2050. Peter Mercer reports.

A WHOLE NEW WAY TO FLY

Airbus has been looking into the future. It has been imagining some of the radical innovations in air travel that could take place by the middle of the century. Its ‘future solutions’ include a revolutionary Airbus Concept Plane and an equally radical Concept Cabin, ideas for ‘smarter flight’ that see improved air traffic management cutting flight times, fuel burns and emissions, and new energy sources that will better protect the environment.

The Concept Plane is an engineer’s dream in the sense that the technological innovations that it brings together are unlikely ever to coexist in an actual aircraft. But if this is not a plane that will ever fly, all the technologies it incorporates are feasible and, indeed, are already being developed by Airbus for applications in future aircraft. What makes the Concept Plane so useful for Airbus engineers is that it provides a platform on which they can bring together different technologies without having to worry about the impact of one on the other – which in reality, of course, is always a major constraint on radical innovation.

The fuselage of the Concept Plane is not the simple tube we are used to but is curved and shaped to provide more internal space for various cabin configurations as well as to improve its aerodynamic performance. This fuselage – and indeed the whole aircraft structure – is manufactured entirely from composite materials to take advantage of their easy-to-shape characteristics. The entry/exit doorways are double doors to enable faster and easier boarding.

Longer and slimmer configured wings reduce drag from the flow of air over the wing surface and so improve fuel efficiency, while the concept plane does not have a vertical tail at all. One of the most important functions of the vertical tail on today’s aircraft, whose engines are installed on the wings, is to provide directional stability in the event of engine failure. But, says Airbus, the engines of the future will have no risk of failure so a vertical tail is unnecessary. Instead the tail section is U-shaped and acts as a shield to reduce the aircraft’s external noise.

The vertical tail will also be redundant because the engines will not hang off the wings. They will be at the rear of the fuselage and semi-embedded. This location optimises fuel burn and improves cabin comfort through much reduced noise levels and is practicable because the superior reliability of future engines will mean that there is much less need for immediate and easy access to engine components.

Maintenance requirements of the aircraft’s electrical and electronic systems will also be greatly reduced. In fact, Airbus believes that future electronic and other on-board systems will be entirely self-sufficient, continuously monitoring their own state of health and scheduling any maintenance that is needed well in advance. Actual maintenance is likely to be minimum to zero.

The composite materials that will be used in the aircraft structure will not only be light and easily shaped – they will also be ‘intelligent’, able to sense the loads that they are under and so making possible an even lighter aircraft that burns less fuel and creates lower emissions. And, despite the advanced nature of these new materials and the complex shapes that will be formed from them, the cost and environmental impact of building the aircraft will be significantly reduced by new manufacturing methods.

The Concept Cabin

What about the interior of the Concept Plane? What would it be like to travel in such an aircraft? The Airbus Concept Cabin brings together alternative possibilities to show what the future of flight might look like from the passengers’ perspective.

The key concept is that aircraft cabins of the future will be customised to the needs of individual passengers. So the Concept Cabin is not built around the traditional cabin classes that we are familiar with in today’s commercial aircraft. Business and Economy class are replaced by zones that target individual needs, such as relaxing, playing games, interacting with other passengers or even holding business meetings with people on the ground. By offering different levels of experience within each zone airlines would be able to achieve the price differential they need to operate a successful business.

But the most radical features of the Concept Cabin are in its structure and the materials it employs. Airbus proposes a bionic structure that mimics the bone structure of birds. Bone is both light and strong thanks to a porous interior that carries tension only where necessary, leaving space elsewhere. So by using bionic structures, the fuselage has the strength it needs but can also make maximum use of extra space.

This bionic structure will be coated with a biopolymer membrane which controls the amount of natural light, humidity and temperature and eliminates the need for windows by making the structure transparent or opaque on command. This smarter structure will not only make the aircraft lighter and more fuel-efficient, but will give passengers unobstructed views of the skies and the earth through the transparent walls of the aircraft. And an integrated neural network, incorporated into the structural materials themselves, will make the hundreds of kilometres of cables and wires of today’s aircraft a thing of the past. This network will even be able to recognise individual passengers, ‘connecting’ them to the plane and identifying and responding to their individual needs.

The fittings and furniture of the cabin will take care of their own cleaning and repairs thanks to innovations such as dirt-repellent coatings and self-healing covers. They may even incorporate morphing materials that can change shape and return to their initial form as they adapt to the specific needs of individual passengers. Advanced holographic technology will enable scenes to be projected onto the cabin walls – images of the aircraft’s destination or of a city skyline or a tropical forest – or could even make a private cabin look like your own bedroom at home or a business conference room.

And whatever you are doing on the plane you will be helping to improve its efficiency; energy harvesting systems will collect your body heat through your seat or your pod as you sleep and combine it with energy collected from sources such as solar panels to fuel cabin appliances.

The Airbus Concept Plane and the Concept Cabin may be the result of future-gazing by Airbus’ engineers but the technologies they feature are far from fanciful and many are already being developed. Whichever of them actually make it into a real airliner of 2050, we can be sure that they will deliver a whole new way to fly. n

© AIRBUS S.A.S