Airbus patents design for aircraft which includes detachable passenger cabin

[Borgholio]

http://www.wired.com/2015/11/airbus-pat ... ing-times/

All right, everyone. It’s quiz time. What’s the worst part about flying? “Everything,” is an entirely appropriate response, but the one thing that’s most miserable about flying is the waiting.

Waiting to get through security. Waiting for bad food and overpriced water. Waiting to get on the damn plane, waiting to get off the damn plane. You’d think the industry’s approach to customer service is “hurry up and wait,” but airlines hate waiting as much as you do. Every moment a plane is a stationary is a moment it isn’t making money. Boeing says cutting an airplane’s “turn-time”—its time on the ground—by 10 minutes improves utilization level 8.1 percent. That’s a big deal in an industry that typically earns a profit of just $8.27 per passenger, and it’s why flight attendants practically push you down the aisle. Airlines want you seated ASAP.

That’s got Airbus reconsidering the boarding process with an idea to turn aircraft cabins into what amount to shipping containers. We’ll pause here to let you groan.

You know Airbus. Aside from making the magnificently huge A380 and very popular A320, the company’s also offered two of the most questionable seating ideas imaginable: The backless bike-seat half-stand model and what we call the steerage concept that essentially stacks passengers. The people in charge of R&D seem to spend a decent amount of time dreaming up ways to make flying even more hellish, but the latest idea—filed in February 2013 and approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office just yesterday—shifts the focus from seats to the cabin itself.

To reduce a plane’s turn-time, Airbus proposes “a removable cabin module, comprising a floor, an upper aircraft fuselage portion connected to the floor, and a first and a second end wall, wherein the first and second end walls, the floor and the upper aircraft fuselage portion form a cabin for transport of passengers, luggage, freight or combinations thereof.”

In other words, it’s a detachable cabin passengers board while its at the gate. Once everyone is seated, the pod is lowered onto the plane. When you arrive at your destination, the cabin is removed, another is added, and the plane takes off. The time it spends on the ground is drastically reduced.

It’s not the craziest idea. If everything in the cabin could be ready and waiting for the pilots when they arrive with the flatbed, as it were, then once the cabin container attached itself you’d be off and running in a jiffy. Airbus has called this the “aircraft pod concept,” saying “passengers could be pre-seated in cabin pods before the plane actually arrives, ready for integration on the aircraft, saving time and making processing much simpler.”
But there are few industries so tightly regulated as the airline industry, and one imagines that the safety protocol of ensuring the pod doesn’t pop off at 36,000 feet would negate at least some of the time saved by not waiting for that jerk with the oversized carry-on to finally check the damn thing.

Then there’s the matter of airport infrastructure. Airbus’ patent includes drawings of the docking stations and transport equipment to shuttle the cabin containers about, but short of snapping our fingers and ending up in Tomorrowland, this kind of terminal overhaul feels highly unlikely. That, and the fact that designing a new plane from scratch takes about a decade and billions of dollars. Something this different from the status quo would almost certainly take more time and more money.

So, yeah. The “Method for boarding and unloading of passengers of an aircraft with reduced immobilization time of the aircraft, aircraft and air terminal for its implementation” won’t be coming to an airport near you any time soon, but at least the designers and engineers at Airbus are dreaming big. And if they get cracking on that VR-helmet idea they floated awhile ago, we might actually start looking forward to the waiting after all.

[Sea Skimmer]

Absurdly not news worthy or practical. Some people at major corporations with billion dollar R&D budgets get paid based on how many patents they file. Also some authors at WIRED are required to produce content to get paid so low and behold we get this combination. Though podded cabin sections and totally modular planes are nothing new anyway, and in the case of the Skycrane helicopter this idea was basically built, but in the specific context of versatility, not hot swapping people.

Even if you could build a detaching cabin without massively increasing the dry weight of the plane the amount of time you'd spend on safety checks adding and removing it would easily nullify even the notional time saving for a civilian aircraft.

[Adam Reynolds]

Absurdly not news worthy or practical. Some people at major corporations with billion dollar R&D budgets get paid based on how many patents they file. Also some authors at WIRED are required to produce content to get paid so low and behold we get this combination. Though podded cabin sections and totally modular planes are nothing new anyway, and in the case of the Skycrane helicopter this idea was basically built, but in the specific context of versatility, not hot swapping people.

Even if you could build a detaching cabin without massively increasing the dry weight of the plane the amount of time you'd spend on safety checks adding and removing it would easily nullify even the notional time saving for a civilian aircraft.

Did skycrane drop the pod or did it unload like a more conventional helicopter? It is also notable that the US military never really used them very often and they were largely replaced in this role by Chinooks. Which should tell you something about the performance of such an idea.

As for this idea I also suspect that it would have problems with aerodynamics as a result of attempts to reduce weight.

A better long term investment is proper high speed rail. For the billions that would be spend on a design like this it could be massively expanded. Railroads could and to an extent do use almost exactly this idea anyway.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Skycrane pod was bolted on manually, but it could on paper be equipped with wheels and the bolts released fairly quickly to be slid away.

A billion projects exist for highly modular aircraft, generally with Skycrane like cut out bellys, so in principle you could have a string of passenger pods, or a string of cargo pods, or space for oversized loads in special (or no) containers but none of this has ever gotten anywhere. The reason is pretty simply that it forces up the structural weight of the aircraft so much the economic rational of modular design is lost.

As for trains, Airbus has some patents for a student project for an airliner to pickup and drop off complete maglev trains cars while moving.



One can guess about how likely something like THAT is to ever be approved. But airbus has a Corporate Policy to proclaim that conventional air travel will overburden the world must be replaced by the A380 and other white elephants, so they put feeder money towards stuff like this instead of just pure efficiency.

Much more realistic things to look out for on future airliners from both Airbus and Boeing are much more oval shaped fuselages or even nearly straight walled ones, because this would lead to much more efficent use of internal space on the plane and the airframes becoming as much as 75% composite. The two kind of go hand in hand, use the weight saving of so much composite to make it weight feasible to be something other then nearly round.

[Sky Captain]

Are passenger aircraft today weight limited or volume limited? Full passenger load + full fuel load usually don't reach maximum take off weight, but most flights also carry some cargo so I don't think there are that much unused weight capacity overall to warrant a new airframe design.

Much more realistic things to look out for on future airliners from both Airbus and Boeing are much more oval shaped fuselages or even nearly straight walled ones, because this would lead to much more efficent use of internal space on the plane and the airframes becoming as much as 75% composite. The two kind of go hand in hand, use the weight saving of so much composite to make it weight feasible to be something other then nearly round.

Wouldn't lifting body shape be way to go for future aircraft? Better efficiency, and increased overall volume may allow to get away with more wasted space because of weird shape.

[Adam Reynolds]

Are passenger aircraft today weight limited or volume limited? Full passenger load + full fuel load usually don't reach maximum take off weight, but most flights also carry some cargo so I don't think there are that much unused weight capacity overall to warrant a new airframe design.

The point is that composites would allow weight savings which would then allow more efficient use of volume. So it would be a solution to both.

Wouldn't lifting body shape be way to go for future aircraft? Better efficiency, and increased overall volume may allow to get away with more wasted space because of weird shape.

A lifting body would have less wasted space, not more. That is because the wings and body are the same structure. That was the whole point of the design.

[Elheru Aran]

So why don't more people use them? Is it just because it's a weird shape (normalcy has greater staying power than you might expect) or are there other drawbacks?

(Speaking of lifting-body designs specifically)

[Adam Reynolds]

I suspect inertia is indeed a key factor, both in lack of serious design work as well as the work that would have to go into safety regulations being totally rewritten to account for the differences. One potential safety problem is the engine placement at the upper rear of the aircraft meaning that if they got loose they would fly into the cargo compartment as opposed to a conventional design in which they would simply fall off. Though it would obviously not be a remotely common problem, it is still the type of issue that regulations have to account for.

The underlying problem is largely one of funding, it is just cheaper to build refined versions of conventional designs for greater fuel effeciency. Airlines would also have to spend money in updating their infrastructure for such a change. So essentially yes, it is normalcy.

[Elheru Aran]

Inertia! That was the word I was looking for.

Now that I think about it, the different aerodynamics would also mean that pilots would have to adjust and re-learn how to operate aircraft with a lifting-body design as opposed to the conventional cylindrical hull, long wing design. Not impossible... but it would take considerable changes in many areas.

Likely a large reason why supersonic aircraft and other interesting notions never took off (so to speak) as well...

[Starglider]

Lifting bodies are not aerodynamically efficient as the primary source of lift. The practical applications have been re-entry vehicles where glide ratio is not a major concern (although in fact poor efficiency and hence crossrange is the exact reason why the space shuttle had wings) and possibly hybrid airships as a third source of lift after aerostatic and direct thrust. Flying wings are areodynamically efficient but only if they don't have to compromise their shape to fit in bulky components such as passenger compartments. For any realistic airliner this requires a ridiculously thick chord that makes them higher drag than the coventional equivalent. Blended-wing-body extracts some aerodynamic dvantages without the major drawbacks, but it's still a more complex structure that's more expensive to build and just less convenient for passenger airliners.

Now that I think about it, the different aerodynamics would also mean that pilots would have to adjust and re-learn how to operate aircraft with a lifting-body design as opposed to the conventional cylindrical hull, long wing design.

This is if anything the least difficult challenge. With modern digital flight control systems the transition is not going to be significantly more expensive than say training a regional jet pilot to fly a 747, which airlines do all the time.

Likely a large reason why supersonic aircraft and other interesting notions never took off (so to speak) as well...

No, some designs had outright control and stability issues, but pilot training cost has never been a significant factor. It is utterly dwarfed by research, tooling, certification and infrastructure costs. In fact even the cost of training the maintenance teams and building up the repair supply chain will dwarf the cost of retraining pilots.

[Sea Skimmer]

Are passenger aircraft today weight limited or volume limited?

Can be either one. The A380 for example is volume limited, which is why the freighter version has never happened. The basic problem is its nearly impossible to make an airliner in which these two things are truly balanced.

Full passenger load + full fuel load usually don't reach maximum take off weight

Often not, but many airliners cannot actually safely take off at MTOW either, if the ambient air is too hot or the altitude too high. These things get complicated.

, but most flights also carry some cargo so I don't think there are that much unused weight capacity overall to warrant a new airframe design.

I think you have no idea how this works then. New airframes are justified by improved technology alone, even were new configurations not on the table. Most of the airliners being built today are designs from the early 1990s or even earlier. They won't be built like that forever. Airbus has no major new aircraft projects at the moment, while Boeing really only has the 777X series, a massive redesign of an existing plane. Both companies thus are poised to begin work on new clean sheet aircraft, though nothing is likely to be announced in less then several years. Both are looking at clean sheet mid or small aircraft, Boeing in particular has a strong internal debate going on about a direct replacement for the 757, which was very popular in the US market and has no successor anywhere. Airbus kind of needs to decide if the A380 has a future or not before it can move forward on anything else.

Wouldn't lifting body shape be way to go for future aircraft? Better efficiency, and increased overall volume may allow to get away with more wasted space because of weird shape.

The problem with a blended wing body or other lifting body airliner is it's only going to work well on a very large plane, usually designs are in the 800-1000 seat class. Otherwise it will have an enormous amount of wasted space and mass, because humans need a certain amount of ceiling height to fit. A slab sided lifting body could overcome some of this problem and use two passenger decks, but that requires a major leap forward in composite airframes to be done with good weight economy. That is not something you'd want to pioneer on a giant plane.

Also lifting bodies tend to have problems with providing widows for passengers. Passengers might not demand real windows in the future, but for right now designers and airliners are not willing to do without them. All airliners could have serious weight savings if they had no windows, but you'd have to clean sheet the plane to get a real advantage out of this.

As it is the A380 is a big enough market failure as it is to make such a giant 800 seat lifting body totally implausible in the next two decades. Problems like not fitting existing airport terminals would only get worse ect on top of that. Congestion would have to get immensely worse to justify them.

Lifting bodies also tend to have other problems you might not think about, that also affect other advanced configuration aircraft. Such as the ideal place for the engines tend to be high mounted back by the tail, rather then under the wings. Airlines hate this because it makes them much harder to inspect and maintain, requiring extra equipment and sometimes being impossible to do at the airport gate. That can drive up operating costs enough to torpedo other gains in efficiency. It can also create serious noise problems.

[Sea Skimmer]

Inertia! That was the word I was looking for.

Now that I think about it, the different aerodynamics would also mean that pilots would have to adjust and re-learn how to operate aircraft with a lifting-body design as opposed to the conventional cylindrical hull, long wing design. Not impossible... but it would take considerable changes in many areas.

They would need a bit different training, but all aircraft do. Nothing is that radical about the performance of a normal looking blended wing body though. The weight is still pretty centered. Lift only gets interesting when you go to an extreme form of flying wing, which is called a spanloader. It's what it sounds like, the cargo weight (or people) and fuel and engines are spread across nearly the entire span of the wing, without a fuselage at all (very few design are pure flying wings, the B-2 for example is not at all, it is strongly a BWB). The result is some rather terrifying rolling inertia.

The advantage though is by evenly spreading the weights across the lifting surface you only need lateral strength to actually hold the ends of the plane together. No vertical loads need to be transmitted across the wing at all. That will save a bunch of weight. Some UAV designs have flown that operate like this, like that 1990s NASA solar plane.

For carrying people such a plane would have to be totally huge though, in ordered to have the interior of the wing be high enough for seating. Planes that big have been put on paper before though, as was a super silly cruise missile carrier plane that had something like 260 ALCM inside the wings, on railroad tracks, with launchers in the wingtips.

Likely a large reason why supersonic aircraft and other interesting notions never took off (so to speak) as well...

Supersonic planes never got far because they did and always will cost more per seat mile. Nothing else matters, certainly not flight controls or stability which are solveable enough. That's a reality of all forms of transportation complaint with normal physics. Speed will always cost money. Since a subsonic plane can already get you anywhere in the world within 24 hours the incentive for higher speed is very weak and niche. All the more so since the longer the flight distance the bigger and proportionally more expensive speed will be, because of all that extra fuel you have to haul supersonically. Meanwhile on short flights so much time is used up on the ground and climbing out from the airport the true travel time saved by flying faster is a bit limited.

A market did exist for the Concord, but with aircraft R&D only getting more expensive its only becoming harder to justify a niche aircraft then it was in the 1960s. Indeed far more likely then a return of m2-3 supersonics (I won't rule out hypersonics 30-40 years from now) is the adaption of slower planes. As in finally solving the noise problems with propfans and large turboprops (also with high speed diesels on the engine front) Those can give us large fuel economy gains right now, in fact we had serious projects for airliners with propfans in the 1980s like the MD-94X, but nobody wants them because they are so noisy. It doesn't just annoy people on the ground, it gets into the cabin rather badly. But our understanding of the fluid dynamics behind this is constantly advancing and large noise reductions have already been shown over 1980s levels. Its just not yet enough to get them down near existing very high bypass turbofans.

Also the bypass ratio on the turbofans (higher) and the fan speeds (lower) keep improving. But they are starting to get near maximums too.

[Simon_Jester]

Another big issue that makes planes like the OP design a pipe dream is airport infrastructure. Nobody wants to buy an airliner that isn't compatible with existing airport infrastructure (needing, say, longer or wider runways, or fundamentally different terminals). Because there are a great many airports in the world, and tearing apart pieces of each one for renovation would have a massive total cost... and without the renovations, the new airliner would be totally useless.

Who wants to buy a plane that is literally useless until you've spent a few billion dollars modifying airports?

This already torpedoed relatively simple innovations like "double decker" passenger compartments for existing heavy passenger planes.

[Elheru Aran]

Didn't they already pull that with the 747, and nowadays the A380?

I do believe there was at least one double-decker airliner back in the day as well... but I'll be darned if I remember the name.

But yes, the infrastructure isn't going to change anytime soon unless the state of aviation technology radically changes, and even then it's more likely that new plane designs will be made to interface with existing infrastructure rather than vice versa.

[Sea Skimmer]

When the 747 was new it was intended to use existing facilities, which was easy because it needed nothing new for runways even though it was much larger then any prior airliner. That was because it also marked the shift from turbojets with horrible takeoff performance to turbofans, and had much larger flaps and far superior brakes to anything before it.

At the time even in the US most airports still didn't have jetways at all, and indeed some would not for another 20 years, they used the portable ramp and bus method of embarkation and thus no real modifications were inherently required except a taller boarding ramp. Efficiently operating the 747 was often the main design goal of adding jetways to airports for the first time. The bus method doesn't scale up well even if you have enclosed ramps to protect against bad weather.

The A380 does need entirely new or heavily rebuilt terminals, and that's been one of major factors preventing it from being successful. It also has much less wingspan then it ideally would for its size, because it would have required entirely NEW AIRPORTS if it had not been held to the level it is. That's held back its fuel economy, such that a 777-200 actually costs less to fly per seat mile if you ignore the crew cost. All the economy gain on the A380 is in fewer crewmen, which is a considerable savings make no mistake but much less then one might expect, and only true if the plane is nearly full of passengers which is the real problem.

The 747-8 with its wider composite wing actually just barely avoided needing new terminals, and requires a study for ground movements at each new airport it operates (might clip stuff turning if you don't plan it) from but that's been no big deal. The 777x meanwhile is becoming the first folding wing airliner specifically to avoid needing bigger terminals then other twin jets.

This issue is FYI why you see wingfins on so many planes now. Making the wing an equal length longer would accomplish the same or greater economy gain, but it's make the planes too wide for whatever gates they are intended to use.

One possible solution to this is the joined wing, an evolution of the biplane wing concept, but while several UAVs are flying with this configuration and its been studied to death for airliners designers are still waiting for more in service data on 100% composite wings before they make the leap to building one like that for a major manned aircraft. Also they can have issues with just where and how you hang the engines off them, particularly if you still want the engine to be easily accessible from the ground.