The Future of Flight

Roland Piquepaille writes "With "High Times," the Economist delivers a very long and extremely well-documented article about the future of aviation during the next fifty years. It tells us about pilotless planes, with 32 countries currently developing more than 250 models of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), primarily for combat purposes. The article also looks at future civilian pilotless planes and at the future of personal aviation. But what captivated my attention in this article was the last part about future commercial supersonic and hypersonic (at least five times the speed of sound) planes. In particular, the Economist describes the HyperSoar. "The HyperSoar is a concept for a craft flying at ten times the speed of sound and able to reach any point on the globe within two hours." This overview contains more details and references about the HyperSoar which would fly from Los Angeles to New York in 35 minutes."

Comments

UAV vs Airline piolts

[atherton2]

commercial airlines have an accident rate of 0.06 crashes per million hours of flying whereas the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk UAV used by the US military has 1600 crashes per million hours of flying. This shows that the UAVs have a long way to go before we can trust our lives to this tecnology.

Re:According to my own virtual tests

[transient]

There are more than just aerodynamic obstacles. How much fuel do your designs consume? What sort of load are they capable of carrying? I bet I can make ten different planes that fly from here to the moon in an hour, with no useful load and at a cost of four trillion per launch. Not to say that your designs aren't practical -- I'd just like to point out that designing airplanes is one third engineering and two thirds economics.