New materials will allow you to change your shape so you have wings that will behave differently at takeoff and during cruise. GE’s Benzakein sees similar revolutions in big-aircraft design. Aircraft designers will exploit, among other things, ducted-fan technology for more efficient propulsion, and box-wing configurations that further improve performance. An albatross soars over the ocean when the wind is more than 10 miles per hour–swooping, zooming, swooping–without flapping its wings, and could go continuously for days.” This is the model that has guided aircraft designers since before the Wrights took to the air in 1903, but materials, design and control systems have been too primitive to realize the dream. If you look at the birds, you find that they can get by without any energy. “I’ve been amazed and delighted to see nature showing what can be done for small airplanes. MacCready sees enormous potential for improvement of small aircraft. Keeping pace with changes in avionics will be changes in the rest of the machine, including simple aerodynamic efficiency. “I mean, you can get on a horse, and if something happens to you, it’s still going to keep plodding along and take you to the next town.” “What you will see with these small aircraft is no less than the ability to have them be equivalent to horses,” says Moore, citing progress in current UAV research. And if technology comes in to rectify this, I think that’s going to make a major impact.” “If you look at accidents,” GE’s Benzakein says, “85 percent of them are caused by pilots. And, of course, if you’re asleep or drunk or don’t do it, the airplane should take over and miss it anyway.”Īn air taxi system, which would put far more aircraft into the sky than ever before, will require a drastic cut in the number of crashes per flight that now occur in general aviation. It should tell you what to do to avoid the problem. The information in the noise signature can tell you all kinds of things about what that threat is. We need intuitive collision avoidance and intuitive navigation, and by ‘intuitive’ I mean we are alerted by a sound that comes from the direction of the threat, not on a screen down here on the instrument panel. We need synthetic vision to see through the clouds.
“I don’t mean anything like the air traffic control system that we have. Rutan describes aircraft with user-friendly cockpits for pilots who find themselves in foul weather or tricky situations. How big a bite next-generation small aircraft will take out of the airline system is impossible to know, but technology will radically transform the pilot and passenger experience.
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