@@jmpompey1 Your employer will. Your notes are a company asset and you should treat your notes that way. For copyright purposes, you need to sign and date pages. Good Luck with your career going forward.
As a retired 737 pilot,(EVERY version except MAX) , aircraft engineer, and simulator instructor I think this is one of your best videos yet! Not only did you cover most of the good and bad issues of blended wing aircraft but you gave one of the best descriptions of the 737 MAX debacle I've yet heard.
13:20 although I love blaming software as an engineer, I must say that this is not bad software, but bad system design. Writing better code doesn't add redundant sensors.
I think they did have multiple sensors on the 737 max, the issue was that the software was only taking decisions based on a single sensor, while it should have used the 3 sensors onboard.
The system contained a redundant sensor, the software was not programmed to correctly identify conflicting sensor information and instead triggers a high AoA warning when only one of the two sensors is actually displaying high AoA.
@@thunderb00m Probably because improvements in software have almost entirely relied on advancements in hardware for the past couple decades. Don't know if this applies to aviation, but the web for sure.
9:45 Fun fact: The Wright Flier, the worlds very first airplane was designed to be unstable. Both the wing and the canard provided lift, meaning if the plane left level flight it would be pushed father out of level flight by the passive forces. This was a deliberate design choice by the Wright Brothers, but subsequent airplane designers disagreed with this design philosophy and future aircraft designs were made to be stable, as you described. For the Centennial celibration of the Wright Brothers first flight a replica Wright Flier was built. Several highly trained and experienced test pilots tried to fly it, landed and refused to try again because the plane was so difficult to control. I'm not sure if the first flight was actually reenacted, but it makes that first flight even more impressive when you think about the fact that test pilots with thousands of hours of flight time were afraid to fly this plane, and the Wright Brothers did it with no flight experience at all. Can you imagine walking out to an airport, renting a Cessna 172 (one of the easiest planes in the world to fly) and teaching yourself to fly it by climbing in and taking off? You could, in theory do this. Flying an airplane isn't much harder than driving a car. But it would be highly illegal. But this was how the first generation of pilots learned to fly. Except they were not renting airplanes carefully designed by aeronautical engineers to be easy to fly. They were flying planes they built themselves with no understanding of aeronautical engineering whatsoever. Or at best very little knowledge. Early aviation is a wild and crazy story with plenty of death.
The very first airplane are you sure? Ader's Eole wasn't a plane because it only flew 50m in 1890 but the Wright's flyer was because it flew 255m after having been catapulted? In the end of the day, Santos Dumont's 14bis remained the first to take off by itself (which is what self-propelled means) and Blériot XI crossing the English Channel was the really first truely operational airplane.
Having a canard does not necessarily make the craft not stabile in pitch. if the Lift curve of the stabilizer is less steep than the wing, a pitch up will self-correct. By the same token, you can have a stabile design with a lifting tail. To be stabile, the combined Aerodynamic Center needs to be behind the CG.
I'd be willing to bet that those failures being due to having a single sensor rather than redundant systems can be traced back to one or more executives earning themselves a bonus because by eliminating redundancy from the original designs they managed to save the company a miniscule amount in production and maintenance costs. This sort of shit usually comes down to the suits having no clue.
The aircraft had multiple sensors, but the code was written by subcontractors that had no expertise in aviation, and considered only a single sensor - it was programmed to switch to the other sensors if the first stopped responding, but it couldn't identify bad data.
So subcontractors with zero aviation expertise wrote the firmware code. Sounds like ANOTHER cost-saving measure implemented by clueless execs. Why pay for expensive aviation coders, when you can hire a cheap software company in India or China?
You build in errors, they have contract, get balance after, costs who cares? Oh, no we gave obligatory few to Israel free, and Russian, China, everyone supposed to be enemy had engineers waiting,, sold technology, stole bluecprints, guess need redesign they copied it exactly almost coincidentally. Contracts bombers fighters thanks!
I’m almost speechless after realizing how much of preparation and production it took to make this great video. What fascinates me the most is that I can watch this for free. This is insane. Huge thanks to the author. You’re making the world a better place.
Now thank ww2 Germans for inventions, and admit it's unlikel we don't have high speed traind mag lev. Gian g winged airships lighter than air. This is folly, old technology dishonest saw others know why.
TH-cam has some crazy good stuff available for free. If you're into space and solar system docs, I highly recommend Melodysheep. The highest quality stuff I've seen in TH-cam and probably anywhere. And it's free.
@@Tpoleful Was going through the comments and I stumbled upon yours and I decided to check it out. Gosh I must say you got me a gem, it is nothing short of extremely well-made videos that make me feel I shouldn't get free access too, I am binging the videos the whole night lol
If you feel like you can help you can always donate something at their Patreon site. I don’t have acces to internet payment methods but there is many channels I would donate to.
This was a very well-researched piece, because you caught a lot of the "why we haven't done this yet" problems, which I suspect was your goal. If I may offer a few criticisms... --"Tube and Wing" was in play from the late 1910's or earlier, and the fact you were specifically talking about jets isn't really relevant for the class of plane being discussed? The reference to fixed diameter tubes later helped specify what you were referring to, but it's still going to be confusing. --You've conflated 'horizontal stabilizer', 'tail', and 'vertical stabilizer' a lot here. The reason the flying wing design without a vertical stabilizer (and instead relying on fly-by-wire) was chosen for the B-2 was always because RCS (Radar Cross Section) was the selected trait to minimize by engineering. You can have vertical stabilization _and_ be a flying wing. Even the original Horton prototypes and some later intermediate prototypes still had passive vertical stabilization, as did the more recent civilian prototypes you've discussed. --The chart with "fuel consumption per passenger over time" I think is labelled as "per decade" when you meant "per year", given that it went from 100 to 50, in 50 years, and the numbers cited were between 1-5%. --Flying wings are weird, but you made no mention of the stability gained by allowing for dihedral wings (as observed in literally every civilian and non-military or fly-by-wire prototype shown), as opposed to the semi-anhedral (because the B-2 is both weird and classified) of the B-2 (which, as it's the only full-scale production flying wing is really the only production reference). No mention either while talking drag of the unusual trans-sonic effects in addition to lifting stress of tube and wing designs fighting the Sears-Haack or Whitcomb-area. Of especial note is how the flying wing/lifting wing must not have a tail to follow these, but can still have vertical stabilizers. --I'm not sure how much research has gone into this(cargo), but a lot of the 'pressure hull' problems actually disappear for cargo applications as they don't require life support, and given the lifting body characteristics I think it would be worth mentioning that designing a flying wing that could contain 2-3 shipping containers that, while remaining sealed or venting the container without surface breach could carry those containers (potentially full of vaccine or medical supplies) halfway around the world, given the known characteristics of the B-2 alone? --Mention the engine mounting problems of a flying wing vs. the weight distribution? Thrust alignment on these things is hard (Read: takeoff vs. cruise problem), and needs to be strongly considered as the 3rd element to center of mass/center of lift, but you only passingly touched on it in wing+tube alone? Just some thoughts based on aviation engineering subtleties I've run into, trying to align this more with some of your previous videos (since I know you've discussed anhedral/dihedral before), and reference for some deeper insights for others to discover. I love that you're taking a serious look at the topic, and bringing what was once a fringe aviation thing out into the limelight for other engineering enthusiasts to feast on!
yeah, can't flying wings simply be passively stabilized by having the center of gravity in front of the center of lift? that doesn't actually require a separate tail, does it? maybe a design could be made that shifts either the center of gravity forward or the center of lift backward in low level flight to increase stability close to the ground, and shifts them closer together for cruising to save fuel, when there is less risk associated with a stall because the plane could easily regain control before hitting the ground?
@@Ass_of_Amalek Sadly, not really. CoG (which is also the Center of Mass) in front of the CoL means that the pull of gravity will create torque against the push up from the center of lift, making the entire thing want to take a nose dive _right_ into the ground without a lot of fighting control surfaces counteracting this. Regarding moving CoM/CoG, that means that you have to move mass which costs fuel to do the moving, and requires adding mass (which is the thing you want less of to be able fly in the first place) that you aren't using for anything else. And also keep in mind that when you exert 'control' of any kind on anything, you're requiring energy expenditure of some kind (fuel, momentum, altitude, and the like if you're talking aviation or rocketry), so that's also something you want less of. Sorry for overrunning you @mor128, trying to provide some context for the idea that the 'Tyranny of the Rocket Equation' applies to Aero- part of Aero-space too.
@@beatmoralimprove The relevant location for stability is not actually the centre of lift, but rather the aerodynamic centre, which can be interpreted as the location of the first derivative of lift, i.e. where a *change* in lift acts. It’s therefore perfectly possible to design a stable aircraft without any downwards lift from a horizontal stabiliser since you can have the CoL match the CoG while the aerodynamic centre is still behind it.
Yup. But Günther was asking about CoL behind CoG/CoM. Good point on me not referencing that the aerodynamic centre exists though. Since I'm trying to show where some of those deeper mathematics and subtleties exist and can lead to, that was my mistake in not at least mentioning that AeroSpace is really cool in part _because_ of how Calculus makes it work, not in spite of it.
I find it incredible how I can sit and absorb your videos for 25-30+ minutes without ever losing focus. Especially impressive is how I leave feeling like I have at least some grasp of the content matter, despite my lack of engineering experience. Truly well done, you might someday consider making a video about the design process and challenges of making your own videos.
And BS at the same time as the entire reason flying wings are not used in commercial airlines has nothing to do with the design for normal operation. It has everything to do with failure modes and the exiting of passengers from the aircraft during said failure modes. It is a logistics problem, not a technical problem. Solve the Logistics problem, get it passed by the FAA/EASA and then every single commercial aircraft will switch to flying wings overnight. Until then... this is baloney.
GRAPH-ONE and the BULLSHIT has already started... For 50 years, PRICE PER passenger-mile only fell from INNOVATION..? Not bc price-fixing became impossible? forcing lower fares? Lower-fares didn't attract more people as it became more affordable..??? The internet boom didn't happen (priceline, etc) forcing cheaper prices..? New, companies with lower operating costs DIDN'T drive companies w high HR under..? Our LYING eyes just thought planes looked nearly REVISIONLESS til the MID-90s..? But ...it's all "engineering" ..? Zat right? (I swear. You make a lot of dubious claims).
@@w8stral I wouldn't be so cruel to call it BS, but I do take issue with some of the info here. Some he touched on, some he missed, three I note here. He talked about the tubular design is great for pressure vessels, and the flying wing not so. I fail to see the weight reduction in a non tubular design of a pressure vessel over the current designs. If carbon fiber is already implemented in tubular aircraft making great weight savings, the race is lost as it will take substantially more composites to pressurize a non tubular flying wing. I have misgivings about doors in the leading edge of a wing, whether for deplaning, or emergency exits. The leading edge is one of the most critical for airflow and to make it all bumpy by adding doors seems to be a bit sketchy. The inefficiency of the horizontal tail downward force can easily be changed by going to a canard style aircraft which removes this issue and adds the safety of a stall resistant aircraft.
I remember years back when this design was just a joke online, and there were plenty of edits with different airline liveries. Didnt expect the world to steer towards this in our timeline
There was a great deal of discussions within Boeing about moving forward with the BWB passenger variant, but in the end the 787 design won since it was still a conventional design but with carbon fiber replacing aluminum. Though the production process was the 787 was a total $ucking nightmare on all levels. From engineering, production and support, it was a death march.
Big deal. I want a window seat. I even like the window seats in which I can see the complicated wing parts work. But maybe I could settle for viewing from multiple cameras, if that is done well?
@@sameebah I wouldn't imagine it would be much longer because as he pointed out there are 6 aisles and exits at the front and rear of each aisle, if thats true that would give a total of 12 emergency exits and redundancy if an aisle is blocked, plus the faster boarding and unboarding times probably mean faster emergency exits too.
I won't hold my breath. We've been seeing concepts just like this as "the future of aviation" for literally my entire life. I remember seeing articles with designs similar to this and headlines like "Is this the Boeing 777?" Then it was "Is this the Boeing 787?" Etc. So yeah - I'll believe it when I see it.
The same exact thing was said about reusable rockets, and SpaceX turned that whole entire industry on its head. To top it off, SpaceX didn’t have a military contract to do all the crazy expensive early R&D with like the aviation industry has with the B2 and B21 airframes. While I wouldn’t bet my retirement fund on a production model before 2040, it wouldn’t surprise me to find myself boarding one by then either.
'as "the future of aviation" for literally my entire life.' Was going to post the same, but of course knew it would already be here.. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..'
13:23 another problem with MCAS was that there was improper training done for it. Pilots could have saved the plane and passengers on both occasions but were unaware they could turn the MCAS off with just one button.
At least on one of the two crashes, the pilots were aware of the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switch being able to fix MCAS fault. Problem was that the elevators were under so much stress that the jack screw was essentially jammed and human power could not be used to trim into reasonable position using the trim wheels. They flipped STAB TRIM CUTOUT back on to use electic trim, which helped at first but later MCAS made the pitch down correction several times in short period, leading to fatal nose dive
That notebook is gorgeous. If you'd released it two years ago I would have bought the hell out of it and it might have made my dissertation's research phase a lot more productive. Even now that I'm not really doing anything close to engineering it might still be the very first piece of TH-camr merch I buy.
This is the best teaching audio-video that I have ever watched & heard. It is dense with information and not a single word is superfluous or wasted. Taking notes in notebooks slows the student down so he/she can come at a concept from different angles until it is thoroughly understood.
I'm glad you covered the cabin pressure factor. This was a concern of mine when we were working on our supersonic commercial flight capstone project as we started deviating from the cylindrical fuselage configuration. One important limitation not covered here is the height vs width of the airframe. If the internal cabin is to be high enough for passengers to walk around, the wingspan must be much larger than that of conventional regional airliners that carry 100 or so passengers. At that point, you might as well add more rows of seats. Its likely we will never see a regional airliner or charter plane of this design for this reason, mainly just international flights where you can sell the extra several hundred seats. If the industry is forced in that direction, they will have to compensate by scheduling less frequent flights to fill the seats.
thats what I'm expecting. even if it has better fuel economy it might still not be worth it if they cant get enough passengers. so we will probably not be seeing the end of the tube and wing design anytime soon. I could easily see it only being feasible for inter-continental flights were the significant increase in fuel economy would make it a no brainer to use.
if economy can get reclining seats for same money then i could be okay with lack of windows.. at least i can sleep through it, something like this would be perfect for cheap/comfier long haul overnight flights
it's not all bad. less frequent regional flights might be well worth it if it also meant much cheaper tickets. i know a lot of people who give up flying to a different state for vacation because of the ticket prices.
This was the topic that I used for my seminar during my university days. I found the BWB (blended wing body) concept extremely fascinating at the time. I was so into it that I referred to so many journals and articles. It's so wonderful to see that Real Engineering also used some of the articles that I used. Of course, he did a better job in explaining the stuff in a more technical way than whatever I did when I was younger. Have watched a lot of videos of Real Engineering, but this one was a wee bit personal and I loved it. 😍 Thank you Real Engineering! :)
The center of mass & lift bit reminds me of something I read during my kerbal days; an aircraft with its center of lift behind its center of mass will fly poorly, an aircraft with its center of lift in front of its center of mass will fly once.
I mean yeah. The trick is to design in the balancing forces appropriately (stabilizers). That's rather difficult if you try to do something new. Even small adjustments make a pretty big difference in flight characteristics.
A lot of my old designs for aircraft in KSP had no angle of attack on the wings or tail, with the center of lift placed in the exact spot of the center of mass. It’s not exactly a bad design, it’s basically what they did with the F-16 IRL. It’s just not amazingly stable. But putting the center of lift further back causes the nose to have a pitch down tendency, which is not convenient if you want to cruise, and it also makes it hard to pitch up effectively. So nowadays I put the center of lift of the wings alone at or just behind the center of mass with a positive AoA tilt, _then_ put the tail on with a negative AoA to avoid the pitch down tendency. It often takes a lot of tweaking to achieve a stable level flight at the preferred cruise speed and to have the fuselage to simultaneously be traveling straight forwards (setting the wing/tail angle wrong can put the fuselage at an angle of attack in level flight, increasing drag and reducing fuel efficiency). Angling lift surfaces in the editor can confuse the position of the center of lift. That’s because for achieving level flight at a certain speed and AoA requires information that the editor doesn’t give you. To get level flight at a target speed with an angle of attack of 0 degrees, you need to know that, at the target speed, the design will generate exactly 1 g of lift, and zero torque. But the editor doesn’t tell you the amount of lift or torque at different speeds, just the average lift vector. Also, lift is supposed to be a vector perpendicular to direction of travel, as any aerodynamic force in the backwards direction is really drag, not lift. And yet the dumb editor in KSP will often show you a lift vector pointing backwards to some degree. Completely not useful.
I’ve been hearing plans for making air travel better for decades. One of the earliest was this this flying wing idea nearly 25 years ago. Yet nothing changes. I’ll believe it when I see it.
The B-2 flying wings have been operational since I was at Strategic Air Command HQ in 1987. That is over 35 years ago. The new B-21 flying wing bombers are going into production right now.
@@raymondswenson1268 I understand that there were experiments as early as 1924, but that's not really the point I'm making. Somone once proposed a passenger aircraft as a flying wing. The entire flying wing would have been the passenger compartment and it promissed business class style seats for coach prices. It seems like 25 years would have been long enough to get at least a prototype off the ground (pardon the pun). Yet air travel remains stubornly miserable.
@@TheMrPeteChannel I'd be curious to know what you're basing that date on. I don't know that any company's particular timeline is what's important here. What probably needs to happen to happen is for a new company to disrupt the industry.
Yeah plus they're not making the flights cheaper lmao they charge more and even then most airlines fail and owe large amounts of debt. Yes planes have become more advanced and safer but only due to the law and loss of many lives if not for them Boeing would of killed hundreds more knowingly because the cost of life was much "cheaper" than grounding all planes and fixing the issues.
@@SonicBurrito Utter bollocks, you act like the laws were made by omnipotent gods who knew more than the manufacturers. As I work in Aerospace I can tell you that the laws/safety regulations are lobbied for by Airbus and Boeing to EASA or the FAA to make it harder to compete with them. If only a company that can spend 10's of millions on safety can produce a plane that limits the companies that can compete with them. They dont hate these laws they love them and actively pay for them through lobbying. This is corrupt corporatist nonsense, the alliance between the lawmakers and the manufacturers is truely disgusting.
@@NiceEvils Any and all craftsmen, people who actually get stuff done. HVAC, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, smiths, machinists(of all kinds) and every other type. Translation may be faulty when using the word technician.
@@juliendenys8826 people are more likely to believe wat they see and not what they hear, but true dont think he did on purpose but just for space saving
@@aaronstephen103 yeah but that is the point, people should use more senses than just their vision to come to a conclusion. also if the axis started at zero the details would be lost so the changing in consumption would be less visible. So in the end it's actually better it started at 50, or else you would just have had a lot of dead space in your graph. There is nothing wrong with the graph but with how the people interpret it.
I am 3rd-year student in mechanical engineering and your videos really motivated me to keep on learning whenever I get bored with subjects in college. Thank you so much.
@@dyadica7151 VR goggles still need more improvement, they need to get smaller. A lot of folks don't like strapping a box to their face. There is a lot of progress in glasses free, 3D holographic displays. Hopefully, by the time blended wing designs are dominant, they will be more inexpensive to manufacture, and will make good "virtual windows". It will probably be a final issue that will need to be addressed before there is wide scale customer acceptance of the new airplane design. I think a lot more people than they think are concerned about having windows. More people want to look out of an airplane window than don't. I'm amazed at how few comments there are about this facet of the design. That's a problem with engineering, engineers frequently forget the human aspect and just go by the numbers. These are not "people movers", they are vehicles that transport human beings, human beings who will not ride in something that they are uncomfortable riding in. A major failure of the airline industry is the "cattleing" of their customers. This needs to STOP!
I am retired mechanical engineer and I just wanted to say I loved your description of how you study at the end of the video. Some how I picked this up at university when some courses allowed us to bring one or two pages of notes into an exam. I soon realized that the act of generating the condensed notes meant that during the exam I had such grasp that I did not really need the notes anymore. I started to create these "cheat" notes for every course and whether or not they were allowed into the exams became irrelevant. Eventually I had a binder of these notes that I still have to this day. I could have used your notebook then!!
I ad exactly the same experience (minus the ability to bring notes into exams) and I still have the condensed notes 40 years later. Writing condensed notes is a great way to fix information in our memory banks.
As an active aircraft mechanic, I have always had some questions and concerns on the blended wing designs incorporation to passenger and cargo applications. Definitely want to thank you for your insights and video as the logic, reasoning, and engineering behind the benefits and changes helped settle a lot of those questions. Very good video!
Good luck servecing those engines on the top of the aircraft tho. Im sure that there isnt a lot of no step surfaces around that area, like some sort of, IDK, elevators, spoilers and flaps, that kind of thing, but it sure is easy to put a person on top of all those, right? Also do we take those engines off by hand or should we bring the trolley, oh wait, we are gonna need a crane...
It’s the sort of thing that’d be a similar approach to current MD-11s. There are inherent differences that’ll come, but modern tech also helps with those. A remote engine oil servicing reservoir, if not just panels on the engine cowlings for a mechanic to easily access necessary components
1:24 this is kinda a misleading graph since it doesnt start at 0. 50% is still a good improvement, but with a quick glance i first thought it was something like a 95% improvement.
Just a minor historical point: the "tube and wing" configuration surely predates even World War I; The B-47 was one of the first such designs with pylon-mounted jet engines and swept wings typical of modern turbine-powered tube and wing aircraft.
Paul Crumley,there weren't any technical lesps and bounds in aircraft before WW1,the first airplane flight was only 16 years before the war started.There were 2 types of biplanes then.A single seater and a dual seater.Germany actually came up with the Delta and the "flying wing with aircraft.The Horton was one ,it never saw service.The Brits stole that and made the Meteor before WW2 ended.The B47 didn't come on to the picture til the early 50s,as it was a long range Nuclear payload bombers.
The engines at the top will also improve safety. The top mounted engines are better protected from debris and bird strikes. The volume ratio should also be better, if it could glide, it should be able to float pretty well
If the engines are placed by the front on top of the wing, they can even help with lift as the engine exhaust blows over the wing. This was used on the Antonov An-72 and An-74. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-72 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-74
Yeah, but servicing them would be a fucking nightmare, you need to climb above the plane, in a region littered with no step zones to inspect them, or the plane would need to purposely leave some places without elevators to access the engines for maintenence, not to mention that to take an engine out you need a crane, botton wing aircraft just need a jack and a steal frame to carry those, a high wing or a tail mounted aircraft needs a hydraulic trolley, but it is doable, a top mounted engine NEEDS a crane, and a good one at that. So small airports operation is gone
@@Creabsley Depends on the operation, I was talking EMBRAER falcon or e2, not 737, so those smaller engine needs service just as much, and air interior dont have the cash to rent a hangar at JFK to service their engines, not to mention catastrophic failures
Great documentary. Being an engineer myself, I just see the beauty of the innovations ... and I'm in awe of them. In a better world, we would celebrate Engineers, scientists and the teachers of these subjects more.
Well, get on with it. Go to the companies that develope these types of aircraft and offer your services however small at a competitive, but at a practical price tag for you to them.
I think the more fuel efficiency per person can be pointed at seat-size, and the number of people being crammed into planes per flight. Although there is no shortage of engineering improvements - fuel efficiency per-passenger get's floated as overall efficiency far too often, and it has been at the expense of the passenger. Flying is no longer something to look forward to. It is an arduous, pain in the butt. As little as 30 years ago this wasn't the case so much and tickets were not that much more expensive if any either.
Something ignored is that as putting people further out you need to add structure strength because as you go away from the center the more turbulence people will experience.
They still have to put the luggage and cargo somewhere, so aside from vibration-sensitive equipment, that's probably how they'll use the parts of the interior that aren't comfortable for human occupancy.
The quality of this video is great: references, calm explanations, clear animations. I'm sure i'm missing some good features. Very interesting Mr Real Engineering.
As an aerospace engineer with specialization in structures, all of these are true. Also I learned new things from this specially the light and weight distribution. Kudos subscribed to your channel
What about the question of increased g-loads for those passengers sitting further from the center-line of the aircraft in the wider bodied blended wing?
Motion sickness is a critical problem with these concepts. Might be okay for cargo. People not so much. Also, if these concepts made sense, Boeing or Airbus would have already done it.
To make active stability safe enough, I find myself thinking that you want not only plenty of redundant cross-checked sensors (both different types and multiple of each), and flight control systems, but also might want to make your control surfaces and their actuators redundant. Design things so you can lose of some some percentage of your control surfaces on independently of others while maintaining sufficient control authority.
Not to mention all Boeing work is done by an offshore (usually India) team, then patched together by an American team (like 3 guys) to make sure it's "certified"
@@dennydravis8758 the problem isn't Boeing's india team, it's the other contractors they hire to code. They go for the lowest price to maximize profits instead of quality
Since 1997, we've had 4 commercial airline events where the people on the flight were killed by the suicidal pilot. You're going to have a hard time getting me to set foot on a plane where a human pilot can overrule computer input. ;)
Fellow software dev--yeah I try to avoid having important things in my life being run by software. It's so easy to mess up, and software "engineering" has nothing like the standards of the hard engineering disciplines.
Please allow me to point out a few mistakes I believe I spotted in this otherwise fine video. Re: Stability @ 8:36 ("the tail is constantly working to counter these forces to push the plane back into desired direction of flight") Actually it is not the tail that stabilizes a plane in a level flight when it encounters turbulence. It is exactly that distance between the center of gravity and the center of lift. Placing the former being in front of the latter creates a negative feedback loop that provides the stability of a level flight. It works like this. The center of gravity (a.k.a. center of mass) is a point (an axis going perpendicular to the screen if we consider a side view) around which the plane revolves when executing maneuvers as well as when it hits turbulence. If a plane hits a turbulence that increases its lift (e.g. a thermal) the increased lift creates a momentum which causes the plane to pitch down and (!) decrease the lift created by wings due to their movement through the air. When COG and COL overlap, or worse, COG is behind the COL a positive feedback is created: turbulence increases the lift, the lift creates momentum that lifts the nose and increases the angle of attack, the lift increases further, rinse and repeat. The horizontal stabilizer only works in a steady state to counter the momentum created by the COG-COL arm and it actually decreases the efficiency of the negative feedback loop described above. Of course, for a real plane to maintain stable level flight horizontal stabilizer is also important, but the major part of the plane's stability comes from the offset between COG and COL. Re: "blended wing body would need constant active course correction" @ 9:34 That is only half true. Flying wings are very popular among RC hobbyists and they don't suffer from the lack of a horizontal stabilizer at all (same as ordinary planes with delta wings). The main problem for RC flying wings' course stability is the lack of vertical stabilizer. To compensate for that sufficiently big winglets are attached at the wingtips. Exactly @ 10:14 we can see these funny ailerons that go both up and down, they are actually automatically controlled aerodynamic breaks which replace vertical stabilizer. Again. B-2 in particular may by unstable in all three directions (yaw, pitch and roll) but in general a flying wing can be inherently stable pitch-wise and roll-wise (dihedral).
I am surprised you haven't covered the problem with passengers sitting further away from the main axis around which the plane turns. As far as I've heard somewhere, this is a big problem with blended wing body design, because people can get much more easily sick, having to withstand increased forces and movement. Or has this issue been resolved somehow and is not that big of a concern anymore? :)
Maybe it could be used for mixed transport, passengers in the middle and cargo on the sides. A mixed configuration was already tested in traditional planes but the cargo part made it too slow, and it failed commercially, but maybe since a flying wing would need a redesigned stand configuration there might be a way to make it more efficient? Who knows
@@albero319 Failed commercially? Excuse me Combi configurations are a thing used the world over, even more on small cities which sole connection to the world is an airplane
You kind of glossed over airport infrastructure changes. I would be interested to know how much change is required. Will we have to completely redesign airports, or just new jetways?
Surprisingly, most of the airport infrastructure has nothing to do with planes and everything to do with people and their needs, and borders and their red tape
airports already need enough length to slow down planes of current weight, and enough width to allow for the wingspan, both with margins. neither is likely to change substantially, if the lift/mass force position advantage outweighs the pressure force disadvantage they may even sink.
Do they really need to be that big & carry that many passengers? It's been proven that mid-sized medium to long-distance aircraft have a quicker turn-around time at airports, which saves money!
To: Real Engineering This piece on the future of the blended wing was so impressive. Your little commercial at the end, talking about your process of understanding new material, is what caused me to subscribe. I almost NEVER subscribe to anything. You rock, keep up the good work!
Subscribed! My dad was an engineer! I find it fascinating and I love systems. I am proof that girls were not encouraged to go into important interesting careers. That is finally changing thanks to STEM programs. I love the billboard that says She can STEM. So can you. She’s wearing the helmet of a cosmonaut. There are a few flowers floating around her. Probably one of the most fave billboards I have ever seen.
5:04 That's on purpose though. You surely could build a perfectly balanced plane, but engineers most over the world are willing to make that tradeoff for safety reasons. If your plane is perfectly balanced or tailheavy, after a stall, there is no way to regain control, since the plane would just fall straight down without changing it's pitch, or even worse, it would increase the angle of attack. As a pilot there's nothing you can do in this situation. If the plane is a bit noseheavy though, after a stall, the downforce on the sabilizer is no longer there, and the weight makes your plane tip over to the front. You regain speed, and can pull up again (assuming you are high enough). Also sorry for the bad english, it is not my native language. Edit: You just explained in your vid that this is on purpose, so my comment is obsolete now :)
Can we just appreciate the quality of the video and edition! All the renders, literature and effort put into this video is insane. Congratulations Just WOW! Big fan of your work.
to be fair KSP has a very basic atmospheric flight simulation. Plane Maker in X-plane 11 is a much better tool to create funny designs yet retain a good level of realism.
@@mro9466 Ferram Aerospace Research mod. IIRC it has a pretty realistic aero simulation, voxelizing the entire vessel and calculating the drag for the entire craft (not per-part basis). It simulates stuff like area ruling and different modes of oscillations. And a lot (and by that I mean: too many) graphs and simulations. And it's still KSP, so stuff breaks on a bart-by-part basis.
Something tells me the primary audience of this channel is probably well aware of misleading graphs and statistics, but they also understand that 50% is a fairly significant number. That and all that empty space on the bottom half of the graph would bother me aesthetically. It's not like he was exaggerating something like a 4% difference. But also to be fair it should be made clear through the use of an axis break symbol.
If that was perfect Poe's Law sarcasm, then I 100% agree. /s If you're being serious, I hate these fucking graphs. They are misleading to anyone not versed in reading graphs and looking for these stupid inconsistencies that completely through off your at-a-glance perception of the graph. /r
It felt weird to me too. We can be amazed by a 48% reduction in fuel consumption without the graph making it look like modern planes basically fly for free. In fact, I was confused at first, since the graph looked so dramatic...
You explained so many concepts in this video, at a level I could understand. You should be a college professor because you are a great teacher. I learned so much.
"We will soon start seeing these planes landing in airports" As if they came from outter space. We have almost reached the tech level we need to start attracting them in our airports, then we capture them, and use for our own good :D Love your channel mate!
I have been wondering a design like this hasn’t been in production. I remembered it this morning and my mind has been racing all day. Thanks for sharing the sentiment and talking about it.
True, but aerospace carbon fiber is not the same kind that's used in cars or bikes. It trades in some strength for increase fatigue resistance, which considering how high the strength of carbon fiber is, would be worthwhile.
Amazing video as always! I would be super interested to see a video on how you think about taking notes, I know it's in keeping with the channel vibe, maybe as an extra on Nebula? Love your stuff!
The problem with blended wings is that passenger aircraft are required by faa to have some sort of manual reversion in case of total power loss. In which case the pilot would be in total control. Flying wings dont fly too good like that due to inherent lack of stability. They would have to figure out a passive means on stability
Incredible video. Very comprehensive and excellently explained, and the engineering is fascinating. This is exactly why Real Engineering is my favourite channel
Awesome vids, as always, would appreciate if that fuel/passenger km had a y axis origin of 0. Not instantly obvious that it's -50% and not -90%. Without context it's a bit misleading.
"broken axes" lead to more information contained in the page why set the Y axis 0-100 if all values fall between 50 and 100? that's throwing away half the page just because people can't be bothered to actually read the graph On top of that, sometimes you want a different scale, like a logarithmic one for covid cases; on a linear scale the few countries with a boatload of cases would have a normal visualization, while the others would be squished in the bottom 10%
Extremely interesting and throughout video 👌 Though you forgot one major issue with blended wing architecture: G loads to the passengers at the sides of the cabin during turnarounds. Obviously this doesn't apply to cargo planes but still.
Spitballing here, but is there any chance the airlines would use that side space for cargo and use the more central parts of the cabin for passengers? On regional flights, it might be difficult to fill all the extra seats anyway, but there's plenty of demand for regional cargo shipments.
@@DurandalsFate that's a way to deal with the issue. But you no longer have a larger cabin for the same footprint. Neither windows. Not sure I would fly this.
The g-force issue during turns is another "gotcha" that is always brought up as an argument against BWB. But would the gentle turns employed by passenger aircraft really impart g-forces greater than a passenger would experience on a tube shaped aircraft during regular turbulence? I sincerely doubt it.
This video is essentially my A-Level research project from 12 years ago.... its sad that we haven't progressed any further since I was looking into this in 2010. However I still think BWB's are the future.
Follow-up video idea: What impacts will these planes bring to passenger airports and their gate layout? Could the costs for adapting existing infrastructure effectively stall the sale of these aircraft?
And so much more. The cost of adoption for these flying wings would be quite high, and they would not solve the real problem the air travel industry faces: carbon emissions. Sure, a good amount of fuel savings is nice, but it means little when you're still emitting a lot of carbon with every flight. What we need is either a carbon-free biofuel (which is a pretty big challenge), an environmentally-friendly fuel that isn't carbon based at all (like hydrogen, which has a LOT of its own challenges/problems), or electrically-powered planes (which has some big problems with energy density of batteries, which vastly reduces the capabilities of electric planes). So we either need a revolutionary breakthrough in battery technology, a revolutionary breakthrough in biofuel technology (technically possible, but difficult), or a revolutionary breakthrough in hydrogen power (hard to see this happening, given that the physics of hydrogen won't change).
They just need additional stairs. Blended wing planes have smaller box for the number of passenger they carry. The airport also need a new procedure so that the utility support equipment is positioned towards the back instead of the right side of the plane but all this equipment are already mobile they just need to train the crew on where to go.
@@kazedcat when you say "smaller box for the number of passengers they carry" do you mean on a per capita basis or in absolute terms? I wonder whether the width of the new planes will be significantly larger than current planes, meaning they wouldn't fit in the layout many airports have today - similar to tree branches. I know that that huge A380 is so big it can't fit in most airports and I think the blended wing model will run into the same type of problem
@@Erik_123 A B2 Spirit have a 52m wingspan with a Maximun Take Off Weight of 170 tons. A boeing 767 have a 48m and a MTOW of 180t. Either this aircraft needs a very long wing, or wing folding tips, even more to get to the number of 450 souls inside.
The flying wing design has a problem with YAW. This originally caused the Northrop XB-49 to crash, reaction time is S-L-O-W. The B2 Spirit gets around this by fly by wire design by not getting itself into an uncontrolled yaw condition. Also the control surfaces are quite different notably the split flaps. These problems will be rectified because a flying wing and lifting body is a heck of alot more efficient in fuel and in passenger space too! I see the clean airliner running on hydrogen which has the highest specific impulse, not battery electric, it's just to damn heavy! So the lifting body design has a lot of advantages in this area with the only design problem be in controlling the aircraft. I know they will solve this however.
8:20 "Removing the tail removes an important stability feature". Well, I reckon that is all we need to know. Airspace is not a blue-sky, calm-wind environment: it is messy, it changes, and it will throw everything you can imagine to try to crash your plane, and add mountain ranges, tricky strips, terrible cross winds when you are short of fuel. Stability is way more important than saving 5% of fuel, if you ask me. Personally, a delta wing is a no-go!
Except for a supersonic airliner like the Concorde. But I agree: controlability is far more important than the small gain in performance ,when eliminating the control and stabilization horizontal surfaces.
@real engineering, you should do a video on porous metals, they’re really interesting, useful and a very big engineering challenge for materials engineers
What a cool airplane. I wish I could fly one through the Grand Canyon at high speed and low altitude. To those who are interested in such things, my 3 favorite aviation/science fiction art books are: - Icon by Frank Frazetta - Beyond the Horizon by John Harris - Great Fighter Jets of the Galaxy by Tim Gibson
Have you thought about making a staple- or thread- bound (bonus points if hardcover) version of the large A4 notebook? Despite what I just wrote in my other comment, I just remembered that my Uni does not actually allow wire bound notebooks to be used as lab books. I think there might be some demand for high quality sturdy lab books out there.
@@ragnkja it's less them not being allowed in the lab and more that we had to keep a log as we went along that is hard to tamper with and edit post-hoc, i. E. By putting pages in and taking them out.
@@Gstrangeman96 The only feasible way to take pages out of the spiral-bound notebooks I’m used to here in Norway is to tear them out (the pages are perforated in case you want to), but that doesn’t exactly let you put them back in again.
As an engineer I see paper with squares, I buy. It’s simple, I’m traumatized and yet comforted by the familiarity of it all. What will I do with it you ask?! I’ll enjoy it.
You are really, really good at explaining complicated things in a simple way. You didn't lose me once! Thank you! I enjoy the experience of understanding complicated things quickly and easily.
@@FUTUREDTECH Life extension, age reversal, and AGI. Also, I know this is not within our scope yet, but I really love the idea of faster than light travel. Fairly likely that will never be possible, but I'm gonna leave a window open in my mind for it. Maybe at least faster than light communication using entangled particles. Wouldn't it be nice to have a real-time connection with the community on Mars? Or real-time connection to mechanical avatars anywhere in the solar system?
@@theobserver9131 Ow yes absolutely, that would be interesting. Definitely looking forward to what the future will bring. Keep an eye out for our channel, maybe we will cover some of those topics in future videos.
The faster than light travel is something I’m curious about too. I curious as to whether it’s actually possible, taking into account the physiology of the human body not just the technology required to make it possible.
2:18 it's not about the size, it's about the bypass ratio. the lower the bypass ratio, the lower the efficiency. another way to increase efficiency is to increase the turbine inlet temperature, or TIT. the problem with that approach is that higher TITs mean more nitrous oxides in the exhaust, and more thermal stress, especially on the turbine blades.
Spiral notebooks sold out, but the moleskin styles ones are still in stock!
As a recent graduate engineer. Essentially no student engineer is going to pay $20 for a notebook, you need to focus on the graduates.
@@jmpompey1 Your employer will. Your notes are a company asset and you should treat your notes that way. For copyright purposes, you need to sign and date pages. Good Luck with your career going forward.
That plane is great for Air Canada, American Airlines and all over the world, including China, Hong Kong, North and South Korea.
@@someguyanonymous5171 You were more annoyed with his Irish accent than me!
UPDATE: Nobody gives a shit.
As a retired 737 pilot,(EVERY version except MAX) , aircraft engineer, and simulator instructor I think this is one of your best videos yet! Not only did you cover most of the good and bad issues of blended wing aircraft but you gave one of the best descriptions of the 737 MAX debacle I've yet heard.
As someone who usually dislikes this channel's content , I can only agree that this is a great video
Agreed
@@YounesLayachi but why do you dislike they seems superb to me.
@@redcrowcrow3929 look closer
@@YounesLayachi Why not spell it out instead of speaking in riddles?
Honey lets go visit the Bahamas in our stealth bomber
If you are the US, this is possible
“Ok honey but I’m piloting this time!”
yooo hipyoo
five minute flight, be home by dinner.
meanwhile in the distant past: honey lets go to the bahamas in our (non stealth) bomber.
13:20 although I love blaming software as an engineer, I must say that this is not bad software, but bad system design. Writing better code doesn't add redundant sensors.
As a software engineer, I want to know why do you love blaming software ?
I think they did have multiple sensors on the 737 max, the issue was that the software was only taking decisions based on a single sensor, while it should have used the 3 sensors onboard.
@@thunderb00m well it's cheap and easy, you see
The system contained a redundant sensor, the software was not programmed to correctly identify conflicting sensor information and instead triggers a high AoA warning when only one of the two sensors is actually displaying high AoA.
@@thunderb00m Probably because improvements in software have almost entirely relied on advancements in hardware for the past couple decades. Don't know if this applies to aviation, but the web for sure.
9:45 Fun fact: The Wright Flier, the worlds very first airplane was designed to be unstable. Both the wing and the canard provided lift, meaning if the plane left level flight it would be pushed father out of level flight by the passive forces.
This was a deliberate design choice by the Wright Brothers, but subsequent airplane designers disagreed with this design philosophy and future aircraft designs were made to be stable, as you described.
For the Centennial celibration of the Wright Brothers first flight a replica Wright Flier was built. Several highly trained and experienced test pilots tried to fly it, landed and refused to try again because the plane was so difficult to control.
I'm not sure if the first flight was actually reenacted, but it makes that first flight even more impressive when you think about the fact that test pilots with thousands of hours of flight time were afraid to fly this plane, and the Wright Brothers did it with no flight experience at all.
Can you imagine walking out to an airport, renting a Cessna 172 (one of the easiest planes in the world to fly) and teaching yourself to fly it by climbing in and taking off? You could, in theory do this. Flying an airplane isn't much harder than driving a car. But it would be highly illegal.
But this was how the first generation of pilots learned to fly. Except they were not renting airplanes carefully designed by aeronautical engineers to be easy to fly. They were flying planes they built themselves with no understanding of aeronautical engineering whatsoever. Or at best very little knowledge.
Early aviation is a wild and crazy story with plenty of death.
Awesome post
The very first airplane are you sure? Ader's Eole wasn't a plane because it only flew 50m in 1890 but the Wright's flyer was because it flew 255m after having been catapulted? In the end of the day, Santos Dumont's 14bis remained the first to take off by itself (which is what self-propelled means) and Blériot XI crossing the English Channel was the really first truely operational airplane.
Loop lplllpppppppp
@@aryagamis More like Loo-crack, snap, aaaaaaaaaaa crunch.
Having a canard does not necessarily make the craft not stabile in pitch. if the Lift curve of the stabilizer is less steep than the wing, a pitch up will self-correct. By the same token, you can have a stabile design with a lifting tail. To be stabile, the combined Aerodynamic Center needs to be behind the CG.
I'd be willing to bet that those failures being due to having a single sensor rather than redundant systems can be traced back to one or more executives earning themselves a bonus because by eliminating redundancy from the original designs they managed to save the company a miniscule amount in production and maintenance costs. This sort of shit usually comes down to the suits having no clue.
The aircraft had multiple sensors, but the code was written by subcontractors that had no expertise in aviation, and considered only a single sensor - it was programmed to switch to the other sensors if the first stopped responding, but it couldn't identify bad data.
Yes, and i would add cramming people into less space like sardines is not something will get ME flying anytime soon
Nah, they didn't eliminate redundancy. They instead sold disagree warnings as an add-on for extra charge!
So subcontractors with zero aviation expertise wrote the firmware code. Sounds like ANOTHER cost-saving measure implemented by clueless execs. Why pay for expensive aviation coders, when you can hire a cheap software company in India or China?
You build in errors, they have contract, get balance after, costs who cares? Oh, no we gave obligatory few to Israel free, and Russian, China, everyone supposed to be enemy had engineers waiting,, sold technology, stole bluecprints, guess need redesign they copied it exactly almost coincidentally. Contracts bombers fighters thanks!
I’m almost speechless after realizing how much of preparation and production it took to make this great video. What fascinates me the most is that I can watch this for free. This is insane. Huge thanks to the author. You’re making the world a better place.
Now thank ww2 Germans for inventions, and admit it's unlikel we don't have high speed traind mag lev. Gian g winged airships lighter than air. This is folly, old technology dishonest saw others know why.
TH-cam has some crazy good stuff available for free. If you're into space and solar system docs, I highly recommend Melodysheep. The highest quality stuff I've seen in TH-cam and probably anywhere. And it's free.
@@Tpoleful Was going through the comments and I stumbled upon yours and I decided to check it out. Gosh I must say you got me a gem, it is nothing short of extremely well-made videos that make me feel I shouldn't get free access too, I am binging the videos the whole night lol
If you feel like you can help you can always donate something at their Patreon site. I don’t have acces to internet payment methods but there is many channels I would donate to.
@@Tpoleful Thanks a lot for the suggestion!
This was a very well-researched piece, because you caught a lot of the "why we haven't done this yet" problems, which I suspect was your goal. If I may offer a few criticisms...
--"Tube and Wing" was in play from the late 1910's or earlier, and the fact you were specifically talking about jets isn't really relevant for the class of plane being discussed? The reference to fixed diameter tubes later helped specify what you were referring to, but it's still going to be confusing.
--You've conflated 'horizontal stabilizer', 'tail', and 'vertical stabilizer' a lot here. The reason the flying wing design without a vertical stabilizer (and instead relying on fly-by-wire) was chosen for the B-2 was always because RCS (Radar Cross Section) was the selected trait to minimize by engineering. You can have vertical stabilization _and_ be a flying wing. Even the original Horton prototypes and some later intermediate prototypes still had passive vertical stabilization, as did the more recent civilian prototypes you've discussed.
--The chart with "fuel consumption per passenger over time" I think is labelled as "per decade" when you meant "per year", given that it went from 100 to 50, in 50 years, and the numbers cited were between 1-5%.
--Flying wings are weird, but you made no mention of the stability gained by allowing for dihedral wings (as observed in literally every civilian and non-military or fly-by-wire prototype shown), as opposed to the semi-anhedral (because the B-2 is both weird and classified) of the B-2 (which, as it's the only full-scale production flying wing is really the only production reference). No mention either while talking drag of the unusual trans-sonic effects in addition to lifting stress of tube and wing designs fighting the Sears-Haack or Whitcomb-area. Of especial note is how the flying wing/lifting wing must not have a tail to follow these, but can still have vertical stabilizers.
--I'm not sure how much research has gone into this(cargo), but a lot of the 'pressure hull' problems actually disappear for cargo applications as they don't require life support, and given the lifting body characteristics I think it would be worth mentioning that designing a flying wing that could contain 2-3 shipping containers that, while remaining sealed or venting the container without surface breach could carry those containers (potentially full of vaccine or medical supplies) halfway around the world, given the known characteristics of the B-2 alone?
--Mention the engine mounting problems of a flying wing vs. the weight distribution? Thrust alignment on these things is hard (Read: takeoff vs. cruise problem), and needs to be strongly considered as the 3rd element to center of mass/center of lift, but you only passingly touched on it in wing+tube alone?
Just some thoughts based on aviation engineering subtleties I've run into, trying to align this more with some of your previous videos (since I know you've discussed anhedral/dihedral before), and reference for some deeper insights for others to discover. I love that you're taking a serious look at the topic, and bringing what was once a fringe aviation thing out into the limelight for other engineering enthusiasts to feast on!
yeah, can't flying wings simply be passively stabilized by having the center of gravity in front of the center of lift? that doesn't actually require a separate tail, does it? maybe a design could be made that shifts either the center of gravity forward or the center of lift backward in low level flight to increase stability close to the ground, and shifts them closer together for cruising to save fuel, when there is less risk associated with a stall because the plane could easily regain control before hitting the ground?
@@Ass_of_Amalek How would you counter the resulting torque of an offset CoL without a horizontal stabilizer?
@@Ass_of_Amalek Sadly, not really. CoG (which is also the Center of Mass) in front of the CoL means that the pull of gravity will create torque against the push up from the center of lift, making the entire thing want to take a nose dive _right_ into the ground without a lot of fighting control surfaces counteracting this. Regarding moving CoM/CoG, that means that you have to move mass which costs fuel to do the moving, and requires adding mass (which is the thing you want less of to be able fly in the first place) that you aren't using for anything else. And also keep in mind that when you exert 'control' of any kind on anything, you're requiring energy expenditure of some kind (fuel, momentum, altitude, and the like if you're talking aviation or rocketry), so that's also something you want less of. Sorry for overrunning you @mor128, trying to provide some context for the idea that the 'Tyranny of the Rocket Equation' applies to Aero- part of Aero-space too.
@@beatmoralimprove The relevant location for stability is not actually the centre of lift, but rather the aerodynamic centre, which can be interpreted as the location of the first derivative of lift, i.e. where a *change* in lift acts. It’s therefore perfectly possible to design a stable aircraft without any downwards lift from a horizontal stabiliser since you can have the CoL match the CoG while the aerodynamic centre is still behind it.
Yup. But Günther was asking about CoL behind CoG/CoM. Good point on me not referencing that the aerodynamic centre exists though. Since I'm trying to show where some of those deeper mathematics and subtleties exist and can lead to, that was my mistake in not at least mentioning that AeroSpace is really cool in part _because_ of how Calculus makes it work, not in spite of it.
I find it incredible how I can sit and absorb your videos for 25-30+ minutes without ever losing focus. Especially impressive is how I leave feeling like I have at least some grasp of the content matter, despite my lack of engineering experience. Truly well done, you might someday consider making a video about the design process and challenges of making your own videos.
BECAUSE THE EARTH IS FLAT !! NASA LIES !! NASA STANDS FOR NOT ALWAYS TELLING TRUTHS ... IT DOESNT TAKE A ROCKET SURGEON TO FIGURE THAT ONE OUT !!
Because you want to watch the video obviously. You are not going to pay attention to something that you dont enjoy about
@@mikewazowski9941 this is too real
This video was extremely comprehensive and well done. Love the work put into it. A+ quality product, learned a ton.
And BS at the same time as the entire reason flying wings are not used in commercial airlines has nothing to do with the design for normal operation. It has everything to do with failure modes and the exiting of passengers from the aircraft during said failure modes. It is a logistics problem, not a technical problem. Solve the Logistics problem, get it passed by the FAA/EASA and then every single commercial aircraft will switch to flying wings overnight. Until then... this is baloney.
GRAPH-ONE and the BULLSHIT has already started...
For 50 years, PRICE PER passenger-mile only fell from INNOVATION..?
Not bc price-fixing became impossible? forcing lower fares?
Lower-fares didn't attract more people as it became more affordable..???
The internet boom didn't happen (priceline, etc) forcing cheaper prices..?
New, companies with lower operating costs DIDN'T drive companies w high HR under..?
Our LYING eyes just thought planes looked nearly REVISIONLESS til the MID-90s..?
But ...it's all "engineering" ..? Zat right? (I swear. You make a lot of dubious claims).
@@FadeDreamer Hey now, that is a good song. The dancing; well is epic =)
Wow people really be pressed that u enjoyed the video
@@w8stral I wouldn't be so cruel to call it BS, but I do take issue with some of the info here. Some he touched on, some he missed, three I note here. He talked about the tubular design is great for pressure vessels, and the flying wing not so. I fail to see the weight reduction in a non tubular design of a pressure vessel over the current designs. If carbon fiber is already implemented in tubular aircraft making great weight savings, the race is lost as it will take substantially more composites to pressurize a non tubular flying wing. I have misgivings about doors in the leading edge of a wing, whether for deplaning, or emergency exits. The leading edge is one of the most critical for airflow and to make it all bumpy by adding doors seems to be a bit sketchy. The inefficiency of the horizontal tail downward force can easily be changed by going to a canard style aircraft which removes this issue and adds the safety of a stall resistant aircraft.
I found the explanation of passive stability control in standard airframes to be especially clear.
It explained why my KSP designs failed so much...
I remember years back when this design was just a joke online, and there were plenty of edits with different airline liveries. Didnt expect the world to steer towards this in our timeline
There was a great deal of discussions within Boeing about moving forward with the BWB passenger variant, but in the end the 787 design won since it was still a conventional design but with carbon fiber replacing aluminum. Though the production process was the 787 was a total $ucking nightmare on all levels. From engineering, production and support, it was a death march.
People thought it was a joke nani
Yeah, like sci-fi space fighters
I'm thinking at StarFox
I suspect the TVA may be involved 😜
Thanks! Awefully informative and inspiring video.
I took flight mechanics last semester and you just condensed the major topics into a well done 30 minute video. Keep up the amazing work
"Faster boarding times" SOLD. Let's do it
Big deal. I want a window seat. I even like the window seats in which I can see the complicated wing parts work. But maybe I could settle for viewing from multiple cameras, if that is done well?
@@yosefmacgruber1920 a cultured man/woman/enby. I respect that.
@@noahnoah2747 you could have just said "person".
"Ah, but what's the evacuation time?"
"Oh bugger . . . "
@@sameebah I wouldn't imagine it would be much longer because as he pointed out there are 6 aisles and exits at the front and rear of each aisle, if thats true that would give a total of 12 emergency exits and redundancy if an aisle is blocked, plus the faster boarding and unboarding times probably mean faster emergency exits too.
"I pay for whole wing, I'll use whole wing"
@oiuet souiu geoffrey tubes, as per Star Trek. Enter from the wing tip on all fours.
Amazing video. Thanks!
I won't hold my breath. We've been seeing concepts just like this as "the future of aviation" for literally my entire life. I remember seeing articles with designs similar to this and headlines like "Is this the Boeing 777?" Then it was "Is this the Boeing 787?" Etc. So yeah - I'll believe it when I see it.
On point!👍
Maybe you came across Vincent Burnelli's designs?
The same exact thing was said about reusable rockets, and SpaceX turned that whole entire industry on its head. To top it off, SpaceX didn’t have a military contract to do all the crazy expensive early R&D with like the aviation industry has with the B2 and B21 airframes. While I wouldn’t bet my retirement fund on a production model before 2040, it wouldn’t surprise me to find myself boarding one by then either.
'as "the future of aviation" for literally my entire life.' Was going to post the same, but of course knew it would already be here.. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..'
did u say the same thing about electric cars?
13:23 another problem with MCAS was that there was improper training done for it. Pilots could have saved the plane and passengers on both occasions but were unaware they could turn the MCAS off with just one button.
At least on one of the two crashes, the pilots were aware of the STAB TRIM CUTOUT switch being able to fix MCAS fault. Problem was that the elevators were under so much stress that the jack screw was essentially jammed and human power could not be used to trim into reasonable position using the trim wheels. They flipped STAB TRIM CUTOUT back on to use electic trim, which helped at first but later MCAS made the pitch down correction several times in short period, leading to fatal nose dive
That notebook is gorgeous.
If you'd released it two years ago I would have bought the hell out of it and it might have made my dissertation's research phase a lot more productive.
Even now that I'm not really doing anything close to engineering it might still be the very first piece of TH-camr merch I buy.
This is the best teaching audio-video that I have ever watched & heard. It is dense with information and not a single word is superfluous or wasted.
Taking notes in notebooks slows the student down so he/she can come at a concept from different angles until it is thoroughly understood.
I'm glad you covered the cabin pressure factor. This was a concern of mine when we were working on our supersonic commercial flight capstone project as we started deviating from the cylindrical fuselage configuration.
One important limitation not covered here is the height vs width of the airframe. If the internal cabin is to be high enough for passengers to walk around, the wingspan must be much larger than that of conventional regional airliners that carry 100 or so passengers. At that point, you might as well add more rows of seats. Its likely we will never see a regional airliner or charter plane of this design for this reason, mainly just international flights where you can sell the extra several hundred seats. If the industry is forced in that direction, they will have to compensate by scheduling less frequent flights to fill the seats.
Thanks for adding in some interesting info!
thats what I'm expecting. even if it has better fuel economy it might still not be worth it if they cant get enough passengers. so we will probably not be seeing the end of the tube and wing design anytime soon. I could easily see it only being feasible for inter-continental flights were the significant increase in fuel economy would make it a no brainer to use.
if economy can get reclining seats for same money then i could be okay with lack of windows.. at least i can sleep through it, something like this would be perfect for cheap/comfier long haul overnight flights
it's not all bad. less frequent regional flights might be well worth it if it also meant much cheaper tickets. i know a lot of people who give up flying to a different state for vacation because of the ticket prices.
Thick wing sections are bad aerodynamics and can never sustain high speeds.Reallity,Air travel is no faster than 45 years ago.
This was the topic that I used for my seminar during my university days. I found the BWB (blended wing body) concept extremely fascinating at the time. I was so into it that I referred to so many journals and articles.
It's so wonderful to see that Real Engineering also used some of the articles that I used.
Of course, he did a better job in explaining the stuff in a more technical way than whatever I did when I was younger.
Have watched a lot of videos of Real Engineering, but this one was a wee bit personal and I loved it. 😍
Thank you Real Engineering! :)
The center of mass & lift bit reminds me of something I read during my kerbal days; an aircraft with its center of lift behind its center of mass will fly poorly, an aircraft with its center of lift in front of its center of mass will fly once.
I mean yeah. The trick is to design in the balancing forces appropriately (stabilizers). That's rather difficult if you try to do something new. Even small adjustments make a pretty big difference in flight characteristics.
LiveType Just add some Spaniards.
LiveType Canards*
A lot of my old designs for aircraft in KSP had no angle of attack on the wings or tail, with the center of lift placed in the exact spot of the center of mass. It’s not exactly a bad design, it’s basically what they did with the F-16 IRL. It’s just not amazingly stable.
But putting the center of lift further back causes the nose to have a pitch down tendency, which is not convenient if you want to cruise, and it also makes it hard to pitch up effectively.
So nowadays I put the center of lift of the wings alone at or just behind the center of mass with a positive AoA tilt, _then_ put the tail on with a negative AoA to avoid the pitch down tendency. It often takes a lot of tweaking to achieve a stable level flight at the preferred cruise speed and to have the fuselage to simultaneously be traveling straight forwards (setting the wing/tail angle wrong can put the fuselage at an angle of attack in level flight, increasing drag and reducing fuel efficiency).
Angling lift surfaces in the editor can confuse the position of the center of lift. That’s because for achieving level flight at a certain speed and AoA requires information that the editor doesn’t give you.
To get level flight at a target speed with an angle of attack of 0 degrees, you need to know that, at the target speed, the design will generate exactly 1 g of lift, and zero torque. But the editor doesn’t tell you the amount of lift or torque at different speeds, just the average lift vector.
Also, lift is supposed to be a vector perpendicular to direction of travel, as any aerodynamic force in the backwards direction is really drag, not lift. And yet the dumb editor in KSP will often show you a lift vector pointing backwards to some degree. Completely not useful.
I’ve been hearing plans for making air travel better for decades. One of the earliest was this this flying wing idea nearly 25 years ago. Yet nothing changes. I’ll believe it when I see it.
The B-2 flying wings have been operational since I was at Strategic Air Command HQ in 1987. That is over 35 years ago. The new B-21 flying wing bombers are going into production right now.
@@raymondswenson1268 I understand that there were experiments as early as 1924, but that's not really the point I'm making. Somone once proposed a passenger aircraft as a flying wing. The entire flying wing would have been the passenger compartment and it promissed business class style seats for coach prices. It seems like 25 years would have been long enough to get at least a prototype off the ground (pardon the pun). Yet air travel remains stubornly miserable.
It's probably still going to be the long tube with twin jets til at least 2070.
@@TheMrPeteChannel I'd be curious to know what you're basing that date on. I don't know that any company's particular timeline is what's important here. What probably needs to happen to happen is for a new company to disrupt the industry.
To be fair: some of this groundbreaking new tech to reduce fuel consumption per passenger is simply "less leg space"...
Only let skinny people fly
"You must be this small to fly Gnome Air." :-)
I'm 6ft 2 and this hurt already.
Yeah plus they're not making the flights cheaper lmao they charge more and even then most airlines fail and owe large amounts of debt. Yes planes have become more advanced and safer but only due to the law and loss of many lives if not for them Boeing would of killed hundreds more knowingly because the cost of life was much "cheaper" than grounding all planes and fixing the issues.
@@SonicBurrito Utter bollocks, you act like the laws were made by omnipotent gods who knew more than the manufacturers.
As I work in Aerospace I can tell you that the laws/safety regulations are lobbied for by Airbus and Boeing to EASA or the FAA to make it harder to compete with them.
If only a company that can spend 10's of millions on safety can produce a plane that limits the companies that can compete with them.
They dont hate these laws they love them and actively pay for them through lobbying.
This is corrupt corporatist nonsense, the alliance between the lawmakers and the manufacturers is truely disgusting.
Imagine the amount of future engineers this channel inspires…
What is needed is technicians, not engineers. Every trade craft across the world is screaming for skilled and experienced technicians.
@@TheArchaos facts. Lmao. What will you do with engineers alone.
@@TheArchaos whats a technician specifically
@@NiceEvils Any and all craftsmen, people who actually get stuff done. HVAC, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, smiths, machinists(of all kinds) and every other type.
Translation may be faulty when using the word technician.
@UCQl5ISroOQGCdSSD9vVD6gw Many words for the same thing, whatever works.
1:23 use zero-based axes unless you have a really good reason not to. Starting at 50 makes it look like consumption dropped by 90%. It didn't.
THIS
as i do agree the graph looks misleading, he did actually say consumption decreased by 50... so the purpose wasn't to mislead
He could put in one of those zigzags to indicate the graph was cut
@@juliendenys8826 people are more likely to believe wat they see and not what they hear, but true dont think he did on purpose but just for space saving
@@aaronstephen103 yeah but that is the point, people should use more senses than just their vision to come to a conclusion. also if the axis started at zero the details would be lost so the changing in consumption would be less visible. So in the end it's actually better it started at 50, or else you would just have had a lot of dead space in your graph. There is nothing wrong with the graph but with how the people interpret it.
Speaking as a longtime engineer, I want to say this is a very well done, accurate and informative video. Kudos!
I believe you, thak you
@@oliviawutam are you being sarcastic ?
So much aeronautical jargon. I cant keep up.
I agree with you. I am a nurse by profession, but I love physics and math so much.
I am 3rd-year student in mechanical engineering and your videos really motivated me to keep on learning whenever I get bored with subjects in college. Thank you so much.
Mob psycho
I'll be a 1st year in a few months...
💯
You got this man
I will be having the main guy who conceived this idea as my professor in university! So excited!
I wonder why it's taken so long to come up with this. Vested interests got in the way?
Jack Northrop and Hugo Junkers are both dead my dude.
@@richpryor9650 lol yeah. But Robert H Liebeck was the professor I will be having. He’s an adjunct professor at UCI.
@@jasonnorth8838 Well good on you man, hopefully you'll get your money's worth.
Cheers!
@@richpryor9650 thanks dude
No doubt that the industry will move this direction. However, having zero (or minimal) window seats, would really bug me.
This is the point. Trying to fix badly designed hardware in software was always a cockeyed way to go about it.
Give me high quality VR goggles that let me imagine I'm the airplane. Still not a window, but I'd fly it.
@@kenoliver8913 eeeeeh fighter jets are also really unstable fixed with software
@@dyadica7151
Also cameras and screens can definitely replicate windows these days.
@@dyadica7151 VR goggles still need more improvement, they need to get smaller. A lot of folks don't like strapping a box to their face.
There is a lot of progress in glasses free, 3D holographic displays. Hopefully, by the time blended wing designs are dominant, they will be more inexpensive to manufacture, and will make good "virtual windows".
It will probably be a final issue that will need to be addressed before there is wide scale customer acceptance of the new airplane design. I think a lot more people than they think are concerned about having windows. More people want to look out of an airplane window than don't.
I'm amazed at how few comments there are about this facet of the design. That's a problem with engineering, engineers frequently forget the human aspect and just go by the numbers. These are not "people movers", they are vehicles that transport human beings, human beings who will not ride in something that they are uncomfortable riding in.
A major failure of the airline industry is the "cattleing" of their customers. This needs to STOP!
The level of detail this dude puts into his videos is incredible. Always a beautifully edited video with loads of info and resources. TH-cam God imo.
I mean, anything of this quality level is done by a team. Though it is a small one.
Odd to simp so much for a guy making TH-cam videos. Settle down man
"TH-cam God imo" TRUE also in MHO
Along with a pleasant narration voice is very captivating.
your are correct sir
I am retired mechanical engineer and I just wanted to say I loved your description of how you study at the end of the video. Some how I picked this up at university when some courses allowed us to bring one or two pages of notes into an exam. I soon realized that the act of generating the condensed notes meant that during the exam I had such grasp that I did not really need the notes anymore. I started to create these "cheat" notes for every course and whether or not they were allowed into the exams became irrelevant. Eventually I had a binder of these notes that I still have to this day. I could have used your notebook then!!
I ad exactly the same experience (minus the ability to bring notes into exams) and I still have the condensed notes 40 years later. Writing condensed notes is a great way to fix information in our memory banks.
As an active aircraft mechanic, I have always had some questions and concerns on the blended wing designs incorporation to passenger and cargo applications. Definitely want to thank you for your insights and video as the logic, reasoning, and engineering behind the benefits and changes helped settle a lot of those questions. Very good video!
Good luck servecing those engines on the top of the aircraft tho. Im sure that there isnt a lot of no step surfaces around that area, like some sort of, IDK, elevators, spoilers and flaps, that kind of thing, but it sure is easy to put a person on top of all those, right? Also do we take those engines off by hand or should we bring the trolley, oh wait, we are gonna need a crane...
It’s the sort of thing that’d be a similar approach to current MD-11s. There are inherent differences that’ll come, but modern tech also helps with those. A remote engine oil servicing reservoir, if not just panels on the engine cowlings for a mechanic to easily access necessary components
1:24 this is kinda a misleading graph since it doesnt start at 0. 50% is still a good improvement, but with a quick glance i first thought it was something like a 95% improvement.
Just because you are easily distracted doesn't make it misleading
@Tjibbe Ettma You're right
4:19 ' Vast amounts of resources '
some really good work he has on that monitor
I'm glad someone else noticed 😅😄
😄😄
Thanks!
Just a minor historical point: the "tube and wing" configuration surely predates even World War I; The B-47 was one of the first such designs with pylon-mounted jet engines and swept wings typical of modern turbine-powered tube and wing aircraft.
Paul Crumley,there weren't any technical lesps and bounds in aircraft before WW1,the first airplane flight was only 16 years before the war started.There were 2 types of biplanes then.A single seater and a dual seater.Germany actually came up with the Delta and the "flying wing with aircraft.The Horton was one ,it never saw service.The Brits stole that and made the Meteor before WW2 ended.The B47 didn't come on to the picture til the early 50s,as it was a long range Nuclear payload bombers.
The engines at the top will also improve safety. The top mounted engines are better protected from debris and bird strikes. The volume ratio should also be better, if it could glide, it should be able to float pretty well
If the engines are placed by the front on top of the wing, they can even help with lift as the engine exhaust blows over the wing. This was used on the Antonov An-72 and An-74.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-72
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-74
@@quentagonthornton49 good for high-light performance from unprepared airfields, not so much efficiency.
Yeah, but servicing them would be a fucking nightmare, you need to climb above the plane, in a region littered with no step zones to inspect them, or the plane would need to purposely leave some places without elevators to access the engines for maintenence, not to mention that to take an engine out you need a crane, botton wing aircraft just need a jack and a steal frame to carry those, a high wing or a tail mounted aircraft needs a hydraulic trolley, but it is doable, a top mounted engine NEEDS a crane, and a good one at that. So small airports operation is gone
Small airports aren’t messing with removing jet engines anyway so it’s a moot point.
@@Creabsley Depends on the operation, I was talking EMBRAER falcon or e2, not 737, so those smaller engine needs service just as much, and air interior dont have the cash to rent a hangar at JFK to service their engines, not to mention catastrophic failures
This is all looking very familuar! haha, another great video as always!
heyo it’s my favorite daily aviation channel
Good to see u buddy
I found it first
Yes i thought this was yours
*familiar
4:19 that guy knows exactly what shape he's left on his screen for filming. 😂
God damn it I saw that too LMAO
Was your dad a hawk ? Your eyes suggest so.
This channel makes me love engineering more everytime.
Great documentary. Being an engineer myself, I just see the beauty of the innovations ... and I'm in awe of them.
In a better world, we would celebrate Engineers, scientists and the teachers of these subjects more.
100%! What future technology innovation are you most excited about?
why should they be celebrities?
I still think that corporate greed, like Boeing's criminal actions will hamper innovation.
This is a fantastic video. I learned a lot.
@@monsieurLDN Why shouldn't they be celebrities?
@@michaelkelly339 because your usual engineer isn't doing anything entertaining
Everytime I see video's about these kind of aircraft, I think to myself "GET ON WITH IT"
Well, get on with it. Go to the companies that develope these types of aircraft and offer your services however small at a competitive, but at a practical price tag for you to them.
I think the more fuel efficiency per person can be pointed at seat-size, and the number of people being crammed into planes per flight. Although there is no shortage of engineering improvements - fuel efficiency per-passenger get's floated as overall efficiency far too often, and it has been at the expense of the passenger. Flying is no longer something to look forward to. It is an arduous, pain in the butt. As little as 30 years ago this wasn't the case so much and tickets were not that much more expensive if any either.
The price of oil and therefore jet fuel is much higher now, due to decreasing supply, increased demand, and opec.
it shouldn't be "something to look forward to" it should be a mode of transport.
He has one of the best voices on the Internet. I love that Irish accent.
A Dub :)
When he said "art" at 26:19, I laughed so hard
Something ignored is that as putting people further out you need to add structure strength because as you go away from the center the more turbulence people will experience.
or perhaps they will make these the economy seats with the interior 'comfortable' seats will serve as all the upper class seats.
@@oceanbytez847 I hate that idea. To keep a problem unfixed for some classist bs like that is vile.
They still have to put the luggage and cargo somewhere, so aside from vibration-sensitive equipment, that's probably how they'll use the parts of the interior that aren't comfortable for human occupancy.
The quality of this video is great: references, calm explanations, clear animations. I'm sure i'm missing some good features. Very interesting Mr Real Engineering.
As an aerospace engineer with specialization in structures, all of these are true. Also I learned new things from this specially the light and weight distribution. Kudos subscribed to your channel
What about the question of increased g-loads for those passengers sitting further from the center-line of the aircraft in the wider bodied blended wing?
Guess where the cheap seats will be located.
Motion sickness is a critical problem with these concepts. Might be okay for cargo. People not so much. Also, if these concepts made sense, Boeing or Airbus would have already done it.
Just allow less roll in the plane specifications.
It would be more fun lol, roller coaster ride for free
Tbh i dont think you would have significant g loads due to to the small bank angels these planes operate in
To make active stability safe enough, I find myself thinking that you want not only plenty of redundant cross-checked sensors (both different types and multiple of each), and flight control systems, but also might want to make your control surfaces and their actuators redundant. Design things so you can lose of some some percentage of your control surfaces on independently of others while maintaining sufficient control authority.
Critical systems require triple redundancy. There is no might want. Only is or it doesnt fly passengers.
As a software dev, you're gonna have a hard time getting me to set foot on a plane where a computer can overrule pilot input.
Not to mention all Boeing work is done by an offshore (usually India) team, then patched together by an American team (like 3 guys) to make sure it's "certified"
@@dennydravis8758 the problem isn't Boeing's india team, it's the other contractors they hire to code. They go for the lowest price to maximize profits instead of quality
Most airplane crashes are caused by human error not computers
Since 1997, we've had 4 commercial airline events where the people on the flight were killed by the suicidal pilot. You're going to have a hard time getting me to set foot on a plane where a human pilot can overrule computer input. ;)
Fellow software dev--yeah I try to avoid having important things in my life being run by software. It's so easy to mess up, and software "engineering" has nothing like the standards of the hard engineering disciplines.
Please allow me to point out a few mistakes I believe I spotted in this otherwise fine video.
Re: Stability @ 8:36 ("the tail is constantly working to counter these forces to push the plane back into desired direction of flight")
Actually it is not the tail that stabilizes a plane in a level flight when it encounters turbulence. It is exactly that distance between the center of gravity and the center of lift. Placing the former being in front of the latter creates a negative feedback loop that provides the stability of a level flight. It works like this.
The center of gravity (a.k.a. center of mass) is a point (an axis going perpendicular to the screen if we consider a side view) around which the plane revolves when executing maneuvers as well as when it hits turbulence. If a plane hits a turbulence that increases its lift (e.g. a thermal) the increased lift creates a momentum which causes the plane to pitch down and (!) decrease the lift created by wings due to their movement through the air. When COG and COL overlap, or worse, COG is behind the COL a positive feedback is created: turbulence increases the lift, the lift creates momentum that lifts the nose and increases the angle of attack, the lift increases further, rinse and repeat.
The horizontal stabilizer only works in a steady state to counter the momentum created by the COG-COL arm and it actually decreases the efficiency of the negative feedback loop described above.
Of course, for a real plane to maintain stable level flight horizontal stabilizer is also important, but the major part of the plane's stability comes from the offset between COG and COL.
Re: "blended wing body would need constant active course correction" @ 9:34
That is only half true. Flying wings are very popular among RC hobbyists and they don't suffer from the lack of a horizontal stabilizer at all (same as ordinary planes with delta wings). The main problem for RC flying wings' course stability is the lack of vertical stabilizer. To compensate for that sufficiently big winglets are attached at the wingtips. Exactly @ 10:14 we can see these funny ailerons that go both up and down, they are actually automatically controlled aerodynamic breaks which replace vertical stabilizer.
Again. B-2 in particular may by unstable in all three directions (yaw, pitch and roll) but in general a flying wing can be inherently stable pitch-wise and roll-wise (dihedral).
25:21 I recognize that guy, he fixed my pluming for free! my wife loves him. I heard he was an astronaut, pilot, soldier and doctor, what a man!
you and i had the same thought
HAHA I was just checking if somebody noticed that too xD
beat me to it...
This comment is criminally underrated
Yoooo😂😂😂
I am surprised you haven't covered the problem with passengers sitting further away from the main axis around which the plane turns. As far as I've heard somewhere, this is a big problem with blended wing body design, because people can get much more easily sick, having to withstand increased forces and movement. Or has this issue been resolved somehow and is not that big of a concern anymore? :)
Maybe it could be used for mixed transport, passengers in the middle and cargo on the sides. A mixed configuration was already tested in traditional planes but the cargo part made it too slow, and it failed commercially, but maybe since a flying wing would need a redesigned stand configuration there might be a way to make it more efficient? Who knows
@@albero319 Failed commercially? Excuse me Combi configurations are a thing used the world over, even more on small cities which sole connection to the world is an airplane
The issue of extra movement will be solved the same way the issue with maintenence of those engines and the 450 passenger capacity. WITH FUCKING MAGIC
@@glockmat but it’s not that common. It is barely done
@@albero319 Please give me your definition of Barely done, because 15% of all Bombardier and ATR planes leave the factory with this configuration
You kind of glossed over airport infrastructure changes. I would be interested to know how much change is required. Will we have to completely redesign airports, or just new jetways?
Surprisingly, most of the airport infrastructure has nothing to do with planes and everything to do with people and their needs, and borders and their red tape
airports already need enough length to slow down planes of current weight, and enough width to allow for the wingspan, both with margins.
neither is likely to change substantially, if the lift/mass force position advantage outweighs the pressure force disadvantage they may even sink.
Kind of agree. In Seattle the SeaTac airport is kind of cramped but it isn’t surprising seeing how it was built in the 40s…
Do they really need to be that big & carry that many passengers?
It's been proven that mid-sized medium to long-distance aircraft have a quicker turn-around time at airports, which saves money!
Barbara was + able but she 8
As an engineer that works on avionics, I would bet everything I have that the engineers complained about the 737. They all knew it was stupid
Plenty of examples of past failures due to final design-decisions being made by executives & bean-counters meeting around a board-room table!
*M2 Bradley has entered the chat*
Yes, tragic 😔
The engineers working daily at the design, sure. But the engineers at the FAA not so much.
@@stevie-ray2020 Challenger disaster comes to mind
These videos make me happy. Brian, your voice is heavenly.
To: Real Engineering
This piece on the future of the blended wing was so impressive. Your little commercial at the end, talking about your process of understanding new material, is what caused me to subscribe. I almost NEVER subscribe to anything. You rock, keep up the good work!
Subscribed! My dad was an engineer! I find it fascinating and I love systems. I am proof that girls were not encouraged to go into important interesting careers. That is finally changing thanks to STEM programs. I love the billboard that says She can STEM. So can you. She’s wearing the helmet of a cosmonaut. There are a few flowers floating around her. Probably one of the most fave billboards I have ever seen.
it has been three decades since all feminists like you have been claiming such but still no results. wants affirmative action for western females
@@soheil527 lol boomer trash comments, both
5:04 That's on purpose though. You surely could build a perfectly balanced plane, but engineers most over the world are willing to make that tradeoff for safety reasons. If your plane is perfectly balanced or tailheavy, after a stall, there is no way to regain control, since the plane would just fall straight down without changing it's pitch, or even worse, it would increase the angle of attack. As a pilot there's nothing you can do in this situation. If the plane is a bit noseheavy though, after a stall, the downforce on the sabilizer is no longer there, and the weight makes your plane tip over to the front. You regain speed, and can pull up again (assuming you are high enough). Also sorry for the bad english, it is not my native language.
Edit:
You just explained in your vid that this is on purpose, so my comment is obsolete now :)
Can we just appreciate the quality of the video and edition! All the renders, literature and effort put into this video is insane. Congratulations Just WOW! Big fan of your work.
Definitely one of the best produced videos on TH-cam
excellent explanation + perspective on passive vs active systems, redundancy, criminality of boeing 737 max cost-cutting, etc
8:19 True KSP players know that it makes planes very instable
to be fair KSP has a very basic atmospheric flight simulation. Plane Maker in X-plane 11 is a much better tool to create funny designs yet retain a good level of realism.
@@mro9466 as a fellow KSP player I can attest to that
@@mro9466 Ferram Aerospace Research mod. IIRC it has a pretty realistic aero simulation, voxelizing the entire vessel and calculating the drag for the entire craft (not per-part basis). It simulates stuff like area ruling and different modes of oscillations. And a lot (and by that I mean: too many) graphs and simulations. And it's still KSP, so stuff breaks on a bart-by-part basis.
ah, I didn't know these, i'll try them ^^
1:28 I love graphs that don't start at zero. This looks dramatic, but it's barely a 50% reduction over 50 years.
Something tells me the primary audience of this channel is probably well aware of misleading graphs and statistics, but they also understand that 50% is a fairly significant number.
That and all that empty space on the bottom half of the graph would bother me aesthetically.
It's not like he was exaggerating something like a 4% difference.
But also to be fair it should be made clear through the use of an axis break symbol.
If that was perfect Poe's Law sarcasm, then I 100% agree. /s
If you're being serious, I hate these fucking graphs. They are misleading to anyone not versed in reading graphs and looking for these stupid inconsistencies that completely through off your at-a-glance perception of the graph. /r
It felt weird to me too. We can be amazed by a 48% reduction in fuel consumption without the graph making it look like modern planes basically fly for free. In fact, I was confused at first, since the graph looked so dramatic...
That's why you focus on the numbers on the graph instead of just the wiggly lines.
At 4:20. someone drew a knob in the flight tracker data. Nice.
Glad I'm not the only one who thought so hah
You explained so many concepts in this video, at a level I could understand. You should be a college professor because you are a great teacher. I learned so much.
Absolutely! What future technology innovation are you most excited about?
1:24 Why doesn't the y-axis start at 0 here? A little exhausted or on a too small screen and you could easily think the average burn is close to 0
active and passive stability was such a *click* in my head when I got my PPL more people need to learn how it works.
"We will soon start seeing these planes landing in airports" As if they came from outter space. We have almost reached the tech level we need to start attracting them in our airports, then we capture them, and use for our own good :D Love your channel mate!
like cargo cults?
I have been wondering a design like this hasn’t been in production. I remembered it this morning and my mind has been racing all day. Thanks for sharing the sentiment and talking about it.
Years of cycling experience would have me believe that carbon reinforced composites are not relatively immune to fatigue compared to aluminum.
True, but aerospace carbon fiber is not the same kind that's used in cars or bikes. It trades in some strength for increase fatigue resistance, which considering how high the strength of carbon fiber is, would be worthwhile.
We are also talking about different kinds of pressure here I think. Unless you bike is experiencing pressure cycles
BECAUSE THE EARTH IS FLAT !! NASA LIES !! NASA STANDS FOR NOT ALWAYS TELLING TRUTHS ... IT DOESNT TAKE A ROCKET SURGEON TO FIGURE THAT ONE OUT !!
Amazing video as always! I would be super interested to see a video on how you think about taking notes, I know it's in keeping with the channel vibe, maybe as an extra on Nebula? Love your stuff!
I'd love to see a blended wing airliner, especially if it's the next step towards sustainable flight. Great video.
no windows, no care
The problem with blended wings is that passenger aircraft are required by faa to have some sort of manual reversion in case of total power loss. In which case the pilot would be in total control. Flying wings dont fly too good like that due to inherent lack of stability. They would have to figure out a passive means on stability
military reading this comment - let's make this dude's dream come true *sends stealth bomber to your area*
@@Demonslayer20111 If all those passengers were pedalling, maybe it could be powered on electricity!
Flying wings have been experimental for a very long time. The Tube and Wing configuration is used because it serves the form=function needs.
You know a person is a true engineer when he's selling graph books instead to mech 😂😂👍
You know someone is (or aspires to be) an engineer, if he's buying those books instead of merch :D
The circle is the optimal shape…
Hey would you like to buy some graph paper? /s
Incredible video. Very comprehensive and excellently explained, and the engineering is fascinating. This is exactly why Real Engineering is my favourite channel
13:46 The Worker was like "Oh, I'm getting recorded... Should do something else for now"
I love the note books you’ve come out with. Im gonna get a new one here soon once my current one is closer to filled.
I'd like to see how this gets out of a stall, corkscrew dive or random tumble before I set foot in one.
Planes stall, corkscrew, and tumble? I'm never setting foot in a plane ever again.
Id imagin a flat spin would be the largest issue. No vertical stabalizer to keep it from yawing.
25:21 Johny Sins is aeronautical engineer too
I knew I would find this comment lol
this is an amazingly well put together, well worded, well thought out video. I appreciate your devotion to excellence in these fields.
Awesome vids, as always, would appreciate if that fuel/passenger km had a y axis origin of 0. Not instantly obvious that it's -50% and not -90%. Without context it's a bit misleading.
agreed
The context is written on the y-axis...
I get that this is a video on youtube, but if you really want to read graphs you need to get the automatic reaction of checking the axis...
@@Daniel-yy3ty good luck teaching everyone to do that. broken axes lead to broken graphs
"broken axes" lead to more information contained in the page
why set the Y axis 0-100 if all values fall between 50 and 100? that's throwing away half the page just because people can't be bothered to actually read the graph
On top of that, sometimes you want a different scale, like a logarithmic one for covid cases; on a linear scale the few countries with a boatload of cases would have a normal visualization, while the others would be squished in the bottom 10%
Extremely interesting and throughout video 👌
Though you forgot one major issue with blended wing architecture: G loads to the passengers at the sides of the cabin during turnarounds. Obviously this doesn't apply to cargo planes but still.
I have a feeling those would be the "Special joy ride seats" according to the flight company XD
Spitballing here, but is there any chance the airlines would use that side space for cargo and use the more central parts of the cabin for passengers? On regional flights, it might be difficult to fill all the extra seats anyway, but there's plenty of demand for regional cargo shipments.
@@DurandalsFate that's a way to deal with the issue. But you no longer have a larger cabin for the same footprint. Neither windows. Not sure I would fly this.
The g-force issue during turns is another "gotcha" that is always brought up as an argument against BWB. But would the gentle turns employed by passenger aircraft really impart g-forces greater than a passenger would experience on a tube shaped aircraft during regular turbulence? I sincerely doubt it.
You forgot to proofread your comment. Check your first sentence.
So detailed, yet I watched for the whole time. The content was hooking and informative. Thank you !!!
This video is essentially my A-Level research project from 12 years ago.... its sad that we haven't progressed any further since I was looking into this in 2010. However I still think BWB's are the future.
Can we just take a moment to appreciate how beautiful and elegant the B-2 Bomber looks!
Ask the Taliban.
@@ktl8818 me who lives in a third world country which recently discovered oil reserves: why do I not hear plane sounds?
@@ssik9460 oh the us is busy with covid also it might be more economical if they just send an oil company
@@sumpogimpo0777 I think it's a joke, because the B-2 is stealthy.
Follow-up video idea: What impacts will these planes bring to passenger airports and their gate layout? Could the costs for adapting existing infrastructure effectively stall the sale of these aircraft?
Sounds like something Wendover would cover.
And so much more. The cost of adoption for these flying wings would be quite high, and they would not solve the real problem the air travel industry faces: carbon emissions. Sure, a good amount of fuel savings is nice, but it means little when you're still emitting a lot of carbon with every flight. What we need is either a carbon-free biofuel (which is a pretty big challenge), an environmentally-friendly fuel that isn't carbon based at all (like hydrogen, which has a LOT of its own challenges/problems), or electrically-powered planes (which has some big problems with energy density of batteries, which vastly reduces the capabilities of electric planes). So we either need a revolutionary breakthrough in battery technology, a revolutionary breakthrough in biofuel technology (technically possible, but difficult), or a revolutionary breakthrough in hydrogen power (hard to see this happening, given that the physics of hydrogen won't change).
They just need additional stairs. Blended wing planes have smaller box for the number of passenger they carry. The airport also need a new procedure so that the utility support equipment is positioned towards the back instead of the right side of the plane but all this equipment are already mobile they just need to train the crew on where to go.
@@kazedcat when you say "smaller box for the number of passengers they carry" do you mean on a per capita basis or in absolute terms? I wonder whether the width of the new planes will be significantly larger than current planes, meaning they wouldn't fit in the layout many airports have today - similar to tree branches. I know that that huge A380 is so big it can't fit in most airports and I think the blended wing model will run into the same type of problem
@@Erik_123 A B2 Spirit have a 52m wingspan with a Maximun Take Off Weight of 170 tons. A boeing 767 have a 48m and a MTOW of 180t. Either this aircraft needs a very long wing, or wing folding tips, even more to get to the number of 450 souls inside.
Your videos are so damn packed with useful info. I love it!
The flying wing design has a problem with YAW. This originally caused the Northrop XB-49 to crash, reaction time is S-L-O-W. The B2 Spirit gets around this by fly by wire design by not getting itself into an uncontrolled yaw condition. Also the control surfaces are quite different notably the split flaps. These problems will be rectified because a flying wing and lifting body is a heck of alot more efficient in fuel and in passenger space too! I see the clean airliner running on hydrogen which has the highest specific impulse, not battery electric, it's just to damn heavy! So the lifting body design has a lot of advantages in this area with the only design problem be in controlling the aircraft. I know they will solve this however.
8:20 "Removing the tail removes an important stability feature". Well, I reckon that is all we need to know. Airspace is not a blue-sky, calm-wind environment: it is messy, it changes, and it will throw everything you can imagine to try to crash your plane, and add mountain ranges, tricky strips, terrible cross winds when you are short of fuel. Stability is way more important than saving 5% of fuel, if you ask me. Personally, a delta wing is a no-go!
Except for a supersonic airliner like the Concorde.
But I agree: controlability is far more important than the small gain in performance ,when eliminating the control and stabilization horizontal surfaces.
@real engineering, you should do a video on porous metals, they’re really interesting, useful and a very big engineering challenge for materials engineers
Great video! I recently saw Airbus' ZEROe concepts, one of which was a blended-wing body.
What a cool airplane. I wish I could fly one through the Grand Canyon at high speed and low altitude.
To those who are interested in such things, my 3 favorite aviation/science fiction art books are:
- Icon by Frank Frazetta
- Beyond the Horizon by John Harris
- Great Fighter Jets of the Galaxy by Tim Gibson
Pause at 4:19 and look at the screens. When you see it.
grow up, and yes I saw it XD
See what 🥺
@@david_junior upside down ding ding
Have you thought about making a staple- or thread- bound (bonus points if hardcover) version of the large A4 notebook?
Despite what I just wrote in my other comment, I just remembered that my Uni does not actually allow wire bound notebooks to be used as lab books.
I think there might be some demand for high quality sturdy lab books out there.
Why aren’t wire-bound notebooks allowed in the lab?
@@ragnkja it's less them not being allowed in the lab and more that we had to keep a log as we went along that is hard to tamper with and edit post-hoc, i. E. By putting pages in and taking them out.
@@Gstrangeman96
The only feasible way to take pages out of the spiral-bound notebooks I’m used to here in Norway is to tear them out (the pages are perforated in case you want to), but that doesn’t exactly let you put them back in again.
As an engineer I see paper with squares, I buy. It’s simple, I’m traumatized and yet comforted by the familiarity of it all. What will I do with it you ask?! I’ll enjoy it.
You are really, really good at explaining complicated things in a simple way. You didn't lose me once! Thank you! I enjoy the experience of understanding complicated things quickly and easily.
Absolute agree! What future technology innovation are you most excited about?
@@FUTUREDTECH Life extension, age reversal, and AGI. Also, I know this is not within our scope yet, but I really love the idea of faster than light travel. Fairly likely that will never be possible, but I'm gonna leave a window open in my mind for it.
Maybe at least faster than light communication using entangled particles. Wouldn't it be nice to have a real-time connection with the community on Mars? Or real-time connection to mechanical avatars anywhere in the solar system?
@@theobserver9131 Ow yes absolutely, that would be interesting. Definitely looking forward to what the future will bring. Keep an eye out for our channel, maybe we will cover some of those topics in future videos.
The faster than light travel is something I’m curious about too. I curious as to whether it’s actually possible, taking into account the physiology of the human body not just the technology required to make it possible.
2:18 it's not about the size, it's about the bypass ratio. the lower the bypass ratio, the lower the efficiency.
another way to increase efficiency is to increase the turbine inlet temperature, or TIT. the problem with that approach is that higher TITs mean more nitrous oxides in the exhaust, and more thermal stress, especially on the turbine blades.
But the size did increase ? RE didn't claim the size makes more efficient, it sounded like a simple observation to illustrate changes
@@YounesLayachi
ok, more power means bigger engine. but size is not directly related to efficiency.
@@mrxmry3264 that's what I said