the last time Boeing set about to create a new aircraft concept the result was something called the model 367-80 this aircraft led directly to Boeing's kc-135 tanker and then the Boeing 707 which quite literally shaped commercial Aviation for over half a century now is Boeing's next recently unveiled concept going to do the same for the 21st century and are there any controversy around it stay tuned all the way through the 737 Max crisis and then the terrible year 2020. the entire Aviation world had been trying to guess when Boeing was going to launch its next all-new aircraft design and what that design might look like now clearly Boeing's finances have been strained a lot in different ways in the last few years they had to handle not only the 727 Max crisis but also the certification of the triple 7x the production issues with the 787 and to combine the 787 production into one single site Boeing also ended the production of the 747 and they had to look for ways to replace thousands of their most experienced but now retiring engineers so in the beginning of 2020 even before we knew just how bad that year would be for everyone Boeing's newly appointed CEO David Calhoun outlined the company's strategy for the coming months Boeing would cancel their development plans for any new airplane designs focus on getting the max back in the air and then save money wherever they possibly could now this plan must be working because late last year Calhoun said that he was now much more optimistic about Boeing's future than when he took over in January 2020 but in the same press conference he also said something that made a lot of Industry insiders race not only one but probably both of their eyebrows boys are that they won't even go to the drawing board this decade for its next aircraft design that's quite a bold statement and on the surface it didn't make much sense because yes there is of course the CFM rice project which won't lead into a production engine before the middle of next decade but why wouldn't Boeing use the time up until then to advance the design of the next aircraft new engine technology and fuel options are still sitting quite far in the future for commercial Aviation and Boeing basically said that they're going to wait for these developments but engines are only a part of the answer when it comes to increasing efficiency there are plenty of potential improvements that involves the rest of the aircraft structure as well new lightweight materials are part of why newer aircraft are more efficient but exploiting the properties of these new materials could lead to aircraft that will also look a lot different and for a more complete understanding of what I mean with that we have to talk a little bit more about the wings if you look at the wing of an old Boeing 707 or a military kc-135 from a certain angle it looks really simple and sleek one reason why they look so clean is that those wings doesn't have those fairings in the rear that cover the flap rail mechanisms nearly all other commercial Jets from the last four decades have some form of these flap track fairings or canoes as they're also often called and that of course begs the question how come the wings of the 707 and also the similarly aged Douglas dc-8 actually manage without them well the answer to that is that these simple Sleek wins of the older designs were actually quite thick rigid and by modern standards really heavy so the fairings could actually be hidden inside of them but weight isn't the only problem here a key characteristic of a wing that determines how efficient it will be is the aspect ratio which is the ratio between its span to its cord in other words the ratio between how long a wing is compared to how wide it is a wing with a very high aspect ratio will produce more lift with less drag or have a better lift to drag ratio so in other words to make a wing design more efficient we need to give it a very large span and make it very narrow from the front to rear and if you have seen pictures of modern gliders you will see exactly what we're talking about that's what we need to do this so if we go back to the Boeing 707 we can clearly see that this is not a very high aspect ratio Wing relatively speaking of course aircraft designers knew all about aspect radius back then as well but you have to remember how early all of this was the Boeing 367-80-80 first flew back in 1954. the jetage and the high speeds it brought with it were still quite new back then and on top of that much of the knowledge about materials like aluminum Alloys and their properties weren't really unlocked until the mid-1960s or even later than that and of course research organizations like NASA have a big role to play in those developments but we'll get to that later these new developments eventually brought us newer designs with longer narrower and thinner wings Composite Materials also allowed Engineers to design wings that Flex as they hold the weight of the aircraft permitting the design of the wing to get even lighter thinner and longer and with that more efficient the wing of the Boeing 787 Dramliner is a fantastic example of that so how do we go from that to this strange new design that Boeing and NASA just presented can't we just re-wing existing Boeing 737s and Airbus a320s to make them more efficient well I'll tell you all about that after this short message from my sponsor who makes it possible for me to make these videos are you planning a trip well in that case today sponsor nordvpn can help you to search for cheaper tickets access your favorite content and protect your data while you're browsing on public Wi-Fi during your travels entering payments while using unsecured Wi-Fi can put your banking information at risk even if the place looks quite safe like an airport lounge for example nordvpn protects you against snoopers malware and phishing websites while ensuring anonymity in payments by credit card on PayPal and also certain 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com Mentor now right now you'll get an exclusive two-year deal plus one month absolutely free so you don't have anything to lose go down click the link check it out thank you nordvpn now let's continue despite new research on materials fitting really long glider-like Wings on an airliner is a real technical challenge glidathar by definition very very light and airliners obviously are not that light and even more to the point fitting a new wing with substantially different dimensions and characteristics to an existing airliner can be a quite challenging if not even possible job to do the wings that just about every airliner are fitted with today use something called a cantilevered design this means that the wing supports itself through its own structure internally Wings have one or more spars which are essentially beams that run the length of the wing and these parts then are bolted onto something called a wing box in the fuselage which acts as an extension of the spores all the way through to the opposite way but many smaller aircraft like the Cessna 172 or other similar designs but also some bigger turbo props use wings with struts supporting them from underneath in these designs the wing itself has a similar internal structure but the strut under the wing actually carries a lot of the load here only the section of the wing that comes after the strut is technically cantilevered however Cessnas and other aircraft that use this design generally have straight wings with no sweep towards the rear so the loads traveling through the length of These Wings Are relatively simple and linear conversely the loads affecting swept wings are much more complicated this isn't really a factor for gliders that have cantilevered but unswept or straight Wings the same goes for turbo props like the dash 8 for example which has straight and relatively High aspect ratio wings in practice for an aircraft to cruise at the speeds that commercial Jets use today close to the speed of sound it really needs swept wings so in its pursuit of a big leap in efficiency NASA has been working on ways to fit wings with aspect radius resembling those of gliders on an aircraft with swept wings that can travel at speeds up to Max 0. 8 the same range of speeds that we normally use today on modern jets the concept that NASA and Boeing are now exploring is called the transonic trust brace wing and John ostrow were at the air current that by the way highly recommended to check out has analyzed it extensively there's a link here in the description as an idea the transonic trust brace Wing or the ttbw is really not that new the design goes back more than a decade to when Boeing was exploring a concept that they called the sugar vault which used a very almost identical Wing setup this aircraft would have had a hybridized propulsion system that would recover electrical energy to boost engine power in certain phases of light but this initial version had very little sweep on its wings and that meant that it would always be slower in Crews initially the airframe was limited to speeds no higher than Max 0. 7 and with the hybrid turbo propulsion system that they were initial planning the aircraft would have been even slower than that the sugar Vault was really trying to test multiple disciplines all at once but lately NASA instead started concentrating on optimizing the airframe and the wing itself with more testing in multiple NASA wind tunnels The Sweep of the wing was able to be increased considerably it is also worth noting here that the wing in itself is swept but the truss braces it at a slightly different angle because of these angles the trough sprays takes load in multiple different directions unlike the struts of for example a Cessna which are simply in tension when it flies also the thrust brace in itself is designed to produce some lift especially at slower speeds the bracing solves the problem of giving the aircraft both a very high aspect rate your wing and a sweep big enough to allow it to fly at transonic speeds the aircraft that this full-scale demonstrator aims to emulate is a typical airliner with roughly the same capacity as a Boeing 77 Max 8 but its wingspan will be much greater that's because the new Wing design will need to have more or less the same area as an existing 737 or an Airbus A320 Wing in order to generate a similar amount of lift and since a higher aspect ratio is needed the wing has to be both shorter front to back and therefore much longer span wise and this long span takes us to the next problem with this design as I explained recently in my video about flying wings which you can check up up here by the way airports today are configured with gates for specific aircraft categories the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320 both have wingspans just under 36 meters or 118 feet and that's because this is the maximum allowable width for an aircraft of this particular gate category airports typically have much fewer Gates adapted for larger sized aircraft and because those aircraft typically handle much more people the airports charge the airlines much much more to use those so any new single aisle design that aims to replace what we use today has to stay within those lower Footprints in order to be able to use the smaller cheaper Gates so how do we solve that equation much wider wingspan but the aircraft needs to fit within the same 36 meters wingspan category Gates well yes that means that we need aircraft with folding wings of course this is something that Boeing has already started doing with its new triple 7x and that they're doing that for the exact same reason to allow it to park at the gate sized like for any other boy in triple seven and not have to go up to the gates for the Airbus A380 or the 747 now we don't actually know if the demonstrator that NASA Boeing are preparing will have this folding Wing but obviously this would have to be the case for an operational airliner based on that design in order for it to be economically viable in today's rules according to the air current the ttbw's wing will have a span of 171 feet about 52 meters and that would mean that the folding section would need to be at least 16 meters or 52 feet long with something that long folding upward we Pilots are probably going to need stronger flashlights when we're doing walkarounds in the Darkness Boeing and NASA once the ttbw test aircraft to make its First Flight Around 2028 which actually isn't that far away and if you think that that sounds unrealistic it actually isn't and that's because the test aircraft isn't going to be designed and built from scratch if the shape of the fuselage of the ttbw models that you've seen seems a bit familiar well that's because it is the fuselage of our McDonald Douglas MD 90.
Boeing plans to use the fuselage tail section landing gear and several existing systems from a couple of md-90s that they have in storage of course the aircraft will have to be modified heavily with a new center section that can support this new unique Wing configuration and one challenge here would be to keep the weight of this new center section in check typically High Wing aircraft are heavier than similarly side lowering designs and that's because in both designs the Lower Side of the fuselage still needs to take up the forces of the landing gear and while those forces will will be taken up by the wing box in a conventional design with this design then will need to be some kind of weight inducing reinforcements there instead plus there is a question of where the fuel is going to be stored with this new design will enough fuel to actually be able to be fitted inside this really really thin wing that will obviously be solved but another cool thing is that these wings are going to be made out of Composites that will allow it to flex like that of the 787 or the triple 7x but given that these ones are even thinner and longer they will likely Flex even more especially outside of the trusses and I'm really looking forward to see that and talking about things that you should be looking forward to see don't miss any of my future videos make sure you've subscribed the goal of the transonic trust breath Wing project is to validate an efficiency gain of nine to ten percent just on the wing configuration alone but of course with the newer propulsion lighter materials and better system integration in the entire aircraft the ultimate goal is an overall efficiency Improvement of a full 30 percent over the 737 Max and remember the 727 Max 8 is already about 14 to 15 percent more efficient than the 727 800 that it's replacing so we're talking some serious improvements here as for the engines well the CFM rise engine that we looked at a couple of weeks ago would probably be a strong candidate for the operational version of this design but the most likely engine choice for the demonstrator will be a version of the pratham Whitney pw1000g gear turbofan this is an engine that powers a lot of Airbus A320 NEOS but so far no Boeing aircraft but it would make sense for NASA to nominate Pratt and Whitney for this project because they're already working with NASA on a number of other related projects including the hybrid thermally efficient core or high-tech that's a project that explores several engine features like ways to shrink the size of the engine core in order to enable even higher bypass ratios and therefore make the engines even more efficient so then order any controversy in all of this well in the past Boeing has accused Airbus of having an unfair Advantage thanks to funding from several European countries and the European Union Airbus have always argued that Boeing was getting tax breaks in the state of Washington as a major employer something that Airbus didn't benefit from in its European sites all this led to a very ugly and costly trade disputes that lasted nearly two decades before finally quieting down in 2021. but during that time Airbus also argued that Boeing was getting a lot of financial support for its projects from NASA and the U.
