No more Sonic Cruiser
2002-12-21 00:16![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blufiveIt's being reported that Boeing's Sonic Cruiser project is being canned. I have to say, I'm not really surprised.
Sustained flight in the transonic region, as this airliner was intended to do, is damn difficult from a technical perspective, so it would be expensive to develop. I can't see any obvious improvements in running costs over a conventional airliner (quite the reverse, in fact - the transonic region is the worst place to be for fuel economy). The speed advantage over regular airliners wouldn't be that big. To cap it all, it looked radically different from most other airliners, and big-budget civil aviation is ridiculously conservative about appearances1. Overall, I'm not sure they ever stood much chance of making a good economic case for it.
Still, it was possibly the most innovative major civil aircraft project I've seen in donkey's years, so I'm a little sad to see it cancelled.
1This conservatism is probably the main reason airliners STILL have forward-facing seats, despite study after study showing that backward-facing seats make a substantial difference to passenger survival rates in accidents. It's the whole "but car owners don't want seat belts because that reminds them that they might crash" argument all over again.
[Link: slashdot]
Sustained flight in the transonic region, as this airliner was intended to do, is damn difficult from a technical perspective, so it would be expensive to develop. I can't see any obvious improvements in running costs over a conventional airliner (quite the reverse, in fact - the transonic region is the worst place to be for fuel economy). The speed advantage over regular airliners wouldn't be that big. To cap it all, it looked radically different from most other airliners, and big-budget civil aviation is ridiculously conservative about appearances1. Overall, I'm not sure they ever stood much chance of making a good economic case for it.
Still, it was possibly the most innovative major civil aircraft project I've seen in donkey's years, so I'm a little sad to see it cancelled.
1This conservatism is probably the main reason airliners STILL have forward-facing seats, despite study after study showing that backward-facing seats make a substantial difference to passenger survival rates in accidents. It's the whole "but car owners don't want seat belts because that reminds them that they might crash" argument all over again.
[Link: slashdot]
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no subject
Date: 2002-12-22 02:32 (UTC)At the risk of making one of those broad predictions that in fifty years will look either obvious or stupid, we've now hit a technical plateau with the design of long-haul large-capacity civil aircraft. Much aircraft design is evolutionary, and to use Richard Dawkins' metaphor of a 'landscape of fitness', the current consensus design for a wide-body airliner is on an evolutionary peak with little obvious direction for improvement. Better designs do exist, but the evolutionary cost of getting to them is too high, and will remain so until some major change reshapes the landscape and makes certain directions of development more attractive. A sharp increase in fuel cost is one such pressure; another might be significant developments in materials technology, which has usually been the factor that has driven revolutions in aircraft design.
If airliners do change, my guess is that it will be as a result of improvements in on-board entertainments. Once your personal screen is good enough it can replace a window - indeed, it already has if you're sat in one of the middle 4 seats on a 747. A move away from the long tube towards a blended wing/body would give much more internal volume for a similar ground footprint. Such designs have their own problems but it does look a promising way ahead - but someone will have to be very brave to build the first one.
MC