FT-1 Clipper

[Steve]

Hi guys

Time for something a bit different. Maybe a distraction...who knows

Here is a video of a presentation that me and 9 other classmates made a few weeks ago...My suggestion is to put the volume on mute because the member who uploaded it bless him seems to have used all the stock YouTube songs in one go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AdsYnsv1Ek" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Three weeks ago us students were randomly divided up into 7 groups of 10 people each, we were given a task. Conceptual design a new airliner of the following specifications:
- 200 passengers
- Mach 0.7-0.85 (460-560mph at airliner altitudes)
- Cruise altitude of 35,000ft or higher
- Improved passenger experience
- 'Off the shelf' engine (no silly fancy propulsion concepts)
- Service entry 2032

The catch? We had a week to design it and present it. We wanted the impossible: Far improved passenger comfort, capacity to operate out of small airports and a cruise speed higher than what was asked for (629mph).

Aircraft features are:
- Small size so it can legally operate out of airports competitors cannot
- Forward swept wings and canards which retract into the fuselage at cruise or minimum drag
- Engines half-buried into the fuselage above the wing and behind the passengers to heavily reduce noise for people in the plane and on the ground
- 38inch pitch as standard (20% more legroom)
- Carry on baggage is kept with each passenger in under seat lockers not overhead bins

For those who wouldn't like to view the presentation, here's what the aircraft looked like in the end:







Disadvantages? Well to fit passengers in at 38in pitch as standard and to meet the much more stringent requirements on aircraft size at smaller airports we were limited to a total length of 37m (15% less)...so we were trying to cram in more passengers in a shorter space, so that meant it had to be a double deck aircraft. It also had to go fast which meant we needed an unconventional body...that means no passenger windows, I personally am not fond of that but we saw no other option if the plane was to ever fly. To compensate we fitted cameras to the outside of the aircraft and projected the pictures to the inner skin of the cabin to allow for one continuous view which is far bigger than a real window could ever be for structural reasons.

Why am I showing this? Well, as I became responsible or the overall packaging of the aircraft I used Truespace for it, it's not the most conventional engineering tool but it allowed us to visualize the aircraft much quicker than with any other program or tool we had available...and believe me I spent a more time than I really should have time trying to make the aircraft look less fat. We had a very long night the final night (5am) trying to zone in on our performance figures which all changed the geometry of the aircraft. We were presenting just 6hrs later...at that point it pretty much became a speed modelling challenge, so it's safe to say that all the ones I took part in back on the old cali-forums have weirdly come to aid me in my (6) hours of need.

Off now to get some sleep, we have a design review of our major aircraft design project
Think of me forever stuck in meetings and presentations

[MikomDude]

Wow, fantastic project. Unfortunately I cannot watch the YouTube presentation video (my net currently has a pre-broadband era speed) but the description and pictures speak for themselves.
I absolutely love the front view. It's a shame you could not have made it less "jumbo" but if you get the time, maybe you can make a more "business jet"-type of aircraft out of this design by making it a little bit more sleek at the center. That would be amazing!

I hope you can post more of these projects, I would love to see them.

[Steve]

Yea we tried to push the front and top view as much as possible

It's really the tail fin that makes it look fat, we were limited on length and needed it to be mounted as far behind the wing as possible for greatest effect so it lost some of that rearward sweep

We can fit 200 passengers on a single deck if we reduced the legroom but that would mean it just becomes a standard 'tube-and-wing' configuration and have no unique selling points, as there's no point in having an unstressed outer skin, it adds unneccesary weight and all we're doing is just making life more difficult with the wing configuration.

If we were to have more relaxed length requirements and make it a Long-haul aircraft however....

I'd love to post more of the things I do but for one reason or another they're not available for general public

[Finis]

Looks cool! It reminds me of a orca or the Sky Whale http://youtu.be/DYxrX7bJg78

This design for a supersonic private jet has that no windows cameras instead thing. http://www.spikeaerospace.com/blog/2014 ... ess-cabin/ (My birthday is soon. Hint. Hint.)

[Steve]

The Sky Whale absolutely grinds my gears. A lot of hype and publicity and no engineering rationale behind it



Problem one. The demand for airliners is rising, by 2032 we need 25,000 more aircraft, that's not total, thats new aircraft. More than 2/3 of those are single aisle aircraft because of the economics.

Problem Two. one of the biggest polluters caused by aircraft isn’t CO2, it isn’t NOX or hydrocarbons, it’s water. The altitudes commercial aircraft operate they leave contrails, these contrails cause cirrus clouds that change the global upper air cloud coverage by 30%, think about what that does to the weather, crops and so on. More efficient engines are a balance between CO2 and NOX, even using hydrogen means a massive weight penalty. But to save drag and fuel we must cruise at a higher altitude...where do you find the balance?

"Green Technologies" are not just about shoving more passengers into the aircraft and fitting solar panels.
Green is coming from the materials, not just bs'ing it away by saying “advanced and modern”, Composites have their place and their disadvantages too, leading edges of wings are still titanium, landing gears are still high-strength steels because of logistics issues as simple as greasing the bearings and the fact that composites shatter and become unusable in a large impact...not buckle but remain intact like metal. Green comes from the reduced maintenance schedules, the reduced turnaround time and correct application of health management. Green is coming from reducing the fuel burn and the energy and cost required in all aspects of the aircraft’s operating life, from cradle to grave. Even down to switching the lights off. Green is about noise reduction of which 15% comes from the landing gear, and looking at the sky whale images you can clearly see there’s a tonne of them. Green is a commercial loss maker and so we must balance it with operator requirements, at the moment airliners have an average profit margin of 1.8% or less, a greener aircraft will typically go slower and carry less. Engineering is always a compromise. Green comes from natural laminar flow wings, morphing high lift device technology, that is in the region of 30% improvement in aerodynamics. That aside we’re struggling to meet fuel burn requirements for 2020 because we are reaching the limit of what internal combustion engines can achieve.

We are looking at methods to allow for the engines to not have to run while the plane is taxiing round the airfield, that can reduce over 10% of the pollution round airports, but the added weight of these systems still only contributes to a 1% overall fuel burn reduction, and even that is a struggle due to the many conflicting requirements

That fuselage, while that would generate a good amount of aerodynamic benefit, structurally would be highly impractical because of the hoop stresses caused by pressurization (given that DOES have windows). Currently my main project features a slightly wider and therefore elliptical fuselage to allow for a second aisle and 2x2x2 seating arrangement, i mean, we’re talking slightly and it is a nightmare from the re-enforcement required. That’s why complicated shapes feature multiple tubes wrapped in unpressurized outer skins. Problem is customers want a lower ‘cabin altitude’, which makes for a greater pressure differential, they want larger windows leading to greater structural weight. The fairings that concept’s got between the wings make no sense and that horseshoe shaped rear-end serves no purpose

Now what about those wings. A 737/A320 style airliner designed to have just a 12% aerodynamic benefit over current aircraft must have wings longer than an A380 due to aspect ratio required, it must fold its wings to meet airport regulations, it must be supported by a strut. Take a look at sugar volt concept by Boeing if you have time, it's enormous. The wings integrating with the fuselage provides drag reducing benefits, we spend so much money on improving the tips of the wings because that's where most of the drag comes from...normal planes have two tips but that's got 4 now.

The amount of center of gravity control needed for rotating engines like it proposes is well beyond 3 stories of fat passengers moving about. Secondly, to take off vertically like cited it will need a thrust to weight of over 1, that’s military fighter jet territory and would make the engine oversized and therefore wholly inefficient for cruise. And for 30 years time we struggle to meet a 35% emissions improvement, design factors which reduce CO2 increase NOX and visa versa. There’s also the balance of size, weight and therefore drag. The only advantage I can see if you would use the spare engines if it’s going on a distributed propulsion system is that some of them could generate the secondary power, but that’s a wholly inefficient use for an engine and it becomes a weight penalty

Even covering the entire wings and fuselage with 100% efficient solar panels that are 20-30-50 years in advance would only just meet the power requirements of SOME of the secondary power systems, and solar panels are hopeless from a maintenance point of view...and are pointless at night.

It also cites that the aircraft uses 'military style fly-by-wire technology'. Well...ALL commercial aircraft are fly-by-wire and were first introduced in the 1980s, this is not new. Studies are looking into Fly-by-Wireless instead, to reduce the fuel penalty associated with lugging round all that heavy cabling (up to about 6 tonnes in a commercial aircraft), fly by wire manages ALL aspects of the aircraft, it governs how the pilots fly (or rather don't) the aircraft, of which the industry is looking to get one or even both of the pilots to save cost.

Where we save cost is in integrated vehicle health management, and it’s not just about slapping some sensors on the plane, these sensors need to be coded, they need to be prioritised, the cost alone in these sensors is astronomical, what you do with the information plays a key factor. And all this has to meet airworthiness requirements, so if it’s too large to fit into airports for example...it's too large.

Green is ACARE
Green is Cleansky

Sure, dream, come up with concepts that challenge our way of thinking, but I implore 'design firms' like that to be sensible and not to hype up concepts that just won't work and just distract us from the real issues, it’s the little things at the end of the day that make or break a concept.

TL;DR It won't work

[Finis]

I meant the sea creature look of it visually reminds me of yours with its sea creature look. I wouldn't be surprised if real designs (ie with engineering merit like yours) do start to resemble or have attributes of various creatures.

Yeah, it seems the designer is a style type of designer not an engineer. Didn't read about him but from the stuff publicized about the plane and other designs on his YT channel it seems so. His other stuff is similar with a nice visual style but the concepts and technical parts are lacking.

Generally, when a visual design, SF/fantasy device/concept, etc. is criticized on technical grounds the critic is lacking some ability to perceive or understand something that others can (imagination, humor, art, beauty, coolness, ...). This guy seems to deserve your wrath since the whale is being misrepresented as something other than an interesting style piece and is being promoted as more than that.

[Steve]

I wouldn't mind the design so much it's just that it's tried to be passed off as credible. To be fair though ours probably won't work either, be it through market resistance or through stability and complexity issues because of the movable 'mustaches' at the front. While more aerodynamic comparatively because of the constantly curved shape the body is too fat for mach 0.9 so we'd need to go through another design iteration.

Interestingly on the whale-like appearance. We all first initially thought it was more like a dolphin, my comment was that if we called it "Clipper" it'll be misinterpreted as "flipper" because of it...5 minutes after I said that we had to re-print the brochures thanks to that very mistake....


http://event.airbus.com/fileadmin/media ... ne_3-1.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That aircraft on the other hand...that looks good

[nigec]

Really nice design, I like the engine layout