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Airbus Patent Shows Modular, Removable Aircraft Cabins (gizmag.com)
Zothecula writes: According to a recently-granted patent, Airbus is exploring the potential of creating a new breed of versatile, modular aircraft that would see detachable passenger cabins slot into a hole in an aeroplane's fuselage. The concept has the potential to revolutionize air travel, while providing significant savings for airlines by reducing the time that planes spend idle on the ground.
Flying with incompetent pilots, the cabin may automatically detach, open a bunch of parachutes and land smoothly somewhere. Makes sense.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
They didn't hear of the Fairchild XC-120 Packplane? The patent should not have been granted in the first place. It is too obvious and has questionable novelty. Besides, what is the value of such patent for Airbus? Obtaining a US patent costs at least $20 000 in attorney manpower. I understand that for Airbus this is peanuts, but if they file many such goofy patents it make a sizeable sum.
Yes they did. It's referenced in the f'ing patent.
Which claim do you think is invalid? Idiot.
Virgil, did you lock the passenger cabin in?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
go wrong?
Well, I did see the concept in a Gerry Anderson film (I think it was Doppelganger/Journey to the far side of the sun).
But a patent isn't always just the concept. It depends on how much detail there is. There's clearly going to be a lot of structural issues that need to be solved. If this patent addresses them then it's valid.
Dang you guys are quick
Precursor tech already did that.
The idea of detachable cabins is obvious: I've heard it discussed before.
What's distinctly not obvious is how to make it structurally sound and lightweight. The problem with detachable cabins is the attachment/detachment mechanisms introduce weight and both the plane without the cabin and the cabin itself (probably to a lesser extent) both need to be structurally sound, so one is more or less doubling up on the number of structural components.
One also has to get the detach-remove-slot-in-reattach new cabin turnaround significantly faster than what it takes to clean a plane in order to offset the inevitable extra costs. The turnaround time for cleaning short haul planes is already pretty fast.
Long haul planes have a substantially longer turnaround time, so it could help there. However, long haul flights are a bit variable in time, so if you squeeze the expected turnaround time too far, any delays will cascade as there's no buffer. Also, longer turn around times are still a small fraction of the total journey time, so even dropping it to zero wouldn't have a vast increase in the number of flights per day.
Oh and of course there's the extra ground crew needed to operate the attachment/detachment thing, versus extra crew to turnaround the plane faster.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
They didn't hear of the Fairchild XC-120 Packplane? The patent should not have been granted in the first place.
You really don't understand patents do you? The patent is not the title. The patent is a method for accomplishing the title. If it's a different method for doing it than the Fairchild XC-120 used, then the XC-120 is not prior art.
As an analogy, if I come up with a method for shutting up arrogant morons, and title the patent, "A method for shutting up arrogant morons," it doesn't mean my patent applies to all methods of shutting up arrogant morons, only the method that I specify in the patent. If somebody else comes along with another method of shutting up arrogant morons that is not the method in my patent or one that I have used before, then my method doesn't count as prior art to their patent.
So what do you say your fantasy is here? You're the one that inflicts pain? You're the one that screams in pain?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I predict this won't happen. The cost of the system, in weight, complexity, ground support and possibly safety I think will outweigh the benefits for all but a few niche markets, which wouldn't be able to support the massive investment required to bring it to market.
A rather smaller example was that Boeing tried to sell the idea of 777s with folding wing tips, so they could use then-current terminal gates (for which the 777 wingspan was too large.) Nobody took them up on it.
However, I am not an airliner engineer. I'd be happy to be proved wrong.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
This in no way considers luggage, or the other additional postal and air freight commercial planes of this nature carry to bring in extra revenue.
Or the Eagle Transporter from Space:1999
Or Thunderbird 2 for that matter. Of course the model makers didn't need to produce something that would actually fly.
is anyone else picturing Thunderbird two?
http://www.answers.com/Q/Plane...
> You really don't understand patents do you? The patent is not the title. The patent is a method for accomplishing the title.
And then you have a bunch of patent lawyers quabbling for years and hundreds of millions whether this is the same method as that.
I see what you are doing there.
The main reason they're doing this?
So they can cram even more people in coach. Because if you can swap out the passenger accommodation, everywhere on the plane can be coach.
I'm guessing they're not seeing so much success with their programs like asking people to upgrade to "premium coach" (5cm extra legroom) for $30.
Except any basic fiscal analysis of airbus's patent will reveal that it won't ever happen. They added 30% to the weight of the aircraft. That weight will lower the number of passengers which will in turn cost more to operate.
With planes going to carbon fiber as aluminum is to heavy adding weight to a plane is useless.
All patents should only be granted to actual products produced within the first 5 years of the patents life.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Thunderbird 2
Even the shape was optimum.
Spoiler alert: 911 like legacy security mean this will NEVER happen.
Thunderbird 2
Riiiiight cause losing baggages was not enough of a skill. You're now going to lose passengers,
Hey Dave where does POD4K go.
It goes to tarmac B4
Before what?
Fuck it , i'll just put it here.
So no, Airbus' patent does not try to monopolize the idea of a detachable freight compartment for planes. It tries to cover a certain method how to achieve the detachable freight compartment for planes.
I had this idea 30 years ago.
The plane I imagined consisted of a cockpit, airfoils, and a 'spine' that ran the length of the plane onto which modular, self-contained passenger or freight modules could be attached. The outer skin of the modules would form the surface of the 'fuselage' for drag reduction. In my design the passengers could board their particular module essentially in the terminal, and with some clever routing information modules could be swapped from plane to plane until their passengers reach their final destination. In case of emergency, each module would have its own parachute system and could be detached from the 'spine' as needed.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
...PRIOR ART!
The whole crux of this invention is to reduce idle time of the plane, proper. But this is poor communication by TFA because it does not mention how much idle time is wasted.
If they can keep the cost and weight penalty low, this could work. Planes (especially short-haul planes) currently spend a significant percentage of the day loading and unloading. If they can cut that down by simply slotting in pre-loaded passengers and bags, this could speed around turnaround times enough for this to make sense.
If it means that they can carry twice as many first class passengers 30% of the time, then they'll still buy it. Economy class passengers lose airlines money - they're only on the plane to lose them less money than having an empty 3/4 of a plane. First/Business meanwhile actually makes money, but the seating is layed out to make sure it's always full.
Or Thunderbird 2 for that matter. Of course the model makers didn't need to produce something that would actually fly.
Certainly, but in the case of Thunderbird 2, it could fly withthout the cargo section. I am not sure the Airbus concept allow for that? The other thing the diagrams don't seem to deal with is the cargo, which would seem to use a conventional approach. If so, in the current form, I don't seem much benefit to the existing method. It just ends up adding weight.
BTW apparently we weren't the only ones who had that Thunderbird image in our heads: http://www.unilad.co.uk/techno...
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
can be found in Lord of the Flies by W Golding
We had to read that in school many decades ago
As an analogy, if I come up with a method for shutting up arrogant morons, and title the patent, "A method for shutting up arrogant morons," it doesn't mean my patent applies to all methods of shutting up arrogant morons
It does if you include "over the internet" in the description.
UPS Did something similar almost 20 years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/27/business/why-ups-is-flying-a-new-package-deal.html?pagewanted=all
So this is like containers for passengers? Can they go multi-modal?
They'lll probably hire the same guy that designed this as architect for the terminal.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
why not? you could probably run the entire cabin through a scanner now...
You really don't understand patents do you? The patent is not the title. The patent is a method for accomplishing the title.
But that isn't how companies have been using patents recently. If your patent lawyers did their job, the patent should be vague enough to cover all methods of accomplishing the title and also a few things entirely unrelated to it.
who cares, why even bother to do a security check on the passenger module?
Just design it so there is no passage from the cockpit to the passenger area. Let's see somebody hijack that.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
There's probably an app for that.
Now they don't have to tie up the whole plane to keep passengers on the tarmac for hours on end. They can package them in a pod and abandon them a few yards away from the terminal.
Nullius in verba
The technology already sort of exists. There are cargo planes that can lift up the nose or tail, and then have freight containers loaded. This gets around the air frame structural problem that some have noted.
I envisioned a "passenger" module that would be slid out once the plane landed, and a "pre-loaded" (with passengers) module would be slid in. This avoids the unload/clean/load time of turning around a plane. If it takes 20 minutes to turn-around a plane (which is pretty fast), the module approach could cut it to 5.
The logical extension, would be to equip the modules with wheels, so the plane could exchange "passenger compartments" without coming to a full stop and use in-flight refueling to keep the planes in the air.
Airbus has never seen an idea that required completely redesigning airports to fit their aircraft that they didn't like.
Because you can't just replace the jetway with this thing, and then load it into the airframe?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
This has been done before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
They didn't hear of the Fairchild XC-120 Packplane?
I hadn't, I've looked it up and now I want one...
or more recently by StarCitizen
https://robertsspaceindustries...
You don't have to look far to reject your claims- Southwest (the most profitable airline in history) doesn't even operate first class. The complexity and fuel cost for a given unit of cargo in flight with a system like Airbus proposes will likely always exceed the opportunity cost of a conventional plane sitting on the ramp for a few extra minutes in a normal turn. Aircraft as modular as this patent describes will probably never happen.
That's a problem largely relegated to software patents. Hardware-based patents, on the other hand, include things like parts diagrams which do a pretty damned good job of demonstrating *exactly* what the patent covers.
Because the concept isn't new or innovative and has definitely been thought of before by people versed in the relevant field.
So an aircraft with swappable modules, according to the patent rules, isn't patentable.
On the other hand, if they aren't trying to patent the concept, but rather their specific mechanism for doing so, that might very well be patentable.
As to 'getting a patent means it's patentable' arguement, we all know that's a farce, after all, when a kid can get a patent for playing on swings by swinging sideways, the system is F'd up! (Yes, that did happen, her dad is a patent lawyer...)
And of course, the obligatory IANAL.
The idea could be taken so much further....
rather than landing the plane, just drop the passenger module(s) into a magnetic decelerator (like a railgun, but backwards) at the airport, meanwhile use another cannon to launch the next passenger module (and perhaps a full fuel tank) to dock with the plane. Now the plane never has to decelerate or land, it can be built just to cruise round and round the world at Mach 0.9. No heavy landing gear, much smaller engines,.... Of course the aim and timing on the magnetic cannons does need to be rather precise.....
So they stole the idea from the Swiss Clip-Air presentation at the 2013 Paris air show. This idea is hardly new and innovative and I believe Popular Science proposed something very similar in the 60's..
Check out the Wikipedia article on Straights Air Freight Express (SAFE) which mentions the installation of a passenger pod into a Bristol Freighter in 1967 to carry passengers to and from the Chatham Islands.
Finally an article for the guy that keeps saying fill in the blank is for cows...moooo and he didn't comment. How disappointing. Could have mod it funny and I have points!