What will airplanes look like in 2025?

Most modern airplanes have a similar design, but NASA has a plan to move the world of aviation into the future by partnering with the world's airplane manufacturers to radically redesign the typical airplane. Tune in to learn more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com,
where smart happens him Marshall Brain with today's question, what
are airplanes in going to look like in the United States?

(00:20):
If you think about the airplanes that are flying in
the United States today, they all look pretty much the same.
If you think about a seven thirty seven or a
seven forty seven, or a seven fifty seven or a
d C ten, it's pretty much a big aluminum tube
with two wings sticking out of it and a tail.
All airplanes have looked like this pretty much since World

(00:42):
War Two for a couple of different reasons, but the
main reason is because this is a very easy design
to manufacture and aluminum. In order to shake up the
design world a little bit and get people thinking in
different ways about new aircraft, NaSTA has been working with
the big aircraft ARAFT manufacturers on a set of new
designs for the year. The most important goal that NASA

(01:07):
is pushing in these new designs is much better fuel economy.
NASA has set an incredibly aggressive goal of reducing fuel
consumption by se in the new airplanes. That's great for
the environment, but it's also great for consumers because when
you buy a ticket on an airplane. The main thing
that's controlling the cost of that ticket is the cost

(01:28):
of the fuel. NASA has some other goals, like much
cleaner exhaust and lower noise production. In addition, NASA wants
these airplanes to not be too radical. They have to
fit into the existing air traffic control structure, and they
have to be able to land and take off at
the existing airports and also fit into the airport gate structure.

(01:48):
If NASA made too radical a change and you had
to retrofit all the airports in the United States or
make the runways longer, something like that, it would probably
be too expensive to carry off. So NASA has chosen
three designs, and they've awarded contracts to three of the
big aircraft manufacturers, Boeing, lockeed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. By

(02:10):
looking at these three designs, we can see what NASA
is thinking. The least radical of the three designs is
the one that lockeed Martin is building. It looks pretty
much like any airplane that we see today. It's a
tube with two wings, but the engines have been reduced
to one and they've been moved to the very back
of the plane. The idea here is to use something

(02:31):
called boundary layer ingestion, taking slower moving air off the
back of the fuselage and running it through the engine
to produce thrust. That step alone could produce some pretty
amazing fuel savings, and by putting the engine up on
top of the fuselage, you lower noise quite a bit.
Northrop Grumman's design looks a lot more radical, but uses

(02:55):
the same basic manufacturing infrastructure that's available today. In this design,
and the plane has not one but two fuselages hanging
side by side under the wings. The idea is that
a fuselage doesn't really add that much extra drag, but
you can get a lot more passengers on the plane,
so you increase the fuel economy per passenger quite a bit.

(03:17):
M I. T did some research around this idea and
they came up with something they called the double bubble fuselage,
where the two fuselages are actually blended together in the
middle of the airplane. And then they put the boundary
layer and gestion engines on the back of the plane
as well, and this gave some pretty remarkable improvements in
fuel economy and noise reduction. And then Boeing's airplane is

(03:41):
the most radical design, it's a giant blended wing approach.
Instead of using a tube with wings approach that's so
universal today, a blended wing aircraft blends the wings and
the fuselage together. The B two Bomber is the best
example of a blended wing approach that's in use today.

(04:01):
Since the fuselage is no longer a tube, it can
be much much wider. There could be a dozen or
more rows of seats inside of one of these airplanes,
and that could increase passenger capacity quite a bit. In
Boeing's designed the engines are also up on top and
in the back of the fuselage to get the boundary
layer ingestion effect and also to reduce noise. Boeing already

(04:24):
has a scale model of this approach flying. It's called
the X forty eight, and the results have been pretty
good so far. The big question here is can the
manufacturing of this type of airplane be perfected. Boeing has
had so much trouble building the seven eight seven, also
known as the Dream Lighter, out of carbon fiber, that
is just not clear that a really radical design like

(04:47):
a blended wing can be manufactured inexpensively and at high volume.
So that's NASA's lineup for It'll be interesting to see
if any of these things actually start flying fifth ten
years from now, and if we board airplanes like this
when we go to the airport. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, doesn't how stuff works dot

(05:09):
Com and don't forget to check out the brain stuff
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