Slashdot Mirror
Pod Planes Could Change Travel Forever (cnn.com)
Max_W writes: Every year we hear about people dying in plane crashes. This does not have to continue as there is a new revolutionary pod plane design [in the works via the Clip-Air project]. A passenger pod is not heavy because it does not contain fuel, engines, avionics, etc., so in case of an accident it can be ejected and land on parachutes. The obstacle to this new invention is that the whole obsolete airport and airline infrastructure must be rebuilt. So what? Shall we continue to get killed because it is easier to produce aircraft with a design from 1950s? The Clip-Air project is created by Switzerland's Federal Polytechnic Institute and consists of the flying component, which includes airframe, cockpit and engines, and the capsules, which are a number of detachable pods that can act as cabin or cargo hold, depending on the chosen configuration. What's particularly noteworthy about them is that they can allow passengers to board capsules well before a flight, and at a location besides an airport, such as a local bus station. As with any concept, many years of research and tests will be needed to validate the concept and turn it into a reality. Claudio Leonardi, manager of the Clip-Air project, and his team are preparing to build a small-scale Clip-Air prototype. They have already initiated some contacts with the aerospace industry.
The mass penalty / structural workarounds, and the low incentive (given how few fatal crashes there are with air travel) will see this being pushed to the "amusing thought" pile and no real further. Much like massive parachutes from a long time ago ( some people use them on their smaller planes though ).
I fail to see how this will eliminate air fatalities. Don't the majority of crashes occur on takeoff or landing?
One example that springs to mind is the Tenerife disaster of 1977, in which two airliners collided on the ground as one of them was taking off. Capsules with parachutes would not have helped a bit AFAICT.
Thanks to /. for posting this story while I'm 10 thousand metres or so above the Skagerrak and making me feel a bit special.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I don't get it.
Airtravel is one of the safest way to travel. I know the fear of flying is common, but actual dying is not.
If you want to rebuild an entire transport-infrastructure because of accidents involving people dying, then I suggest you start with cars and roads.
Someone's finally found a multibillion dollar solution to our nonexistent problem. Could you imagine the death toll if we don't drive down the 1 in a million accident rate? It could reach the thousands if we lump several years together!
See; the XC120 Packplane - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F.... Though the fact it didn't work in 1950, doesn't mean it can't work now. I keep an open mind.
However, the idea of sticking the pod on a railway waggon is a complete non-starter - I'm sure a pod that meets railway crash-resistance standards would be stupidly heavy for aviation use.
Off the top of my head:
1. "Every year we hear about people dying in plane crashes. This does not have to continue..." But air travel is already the safest mode of travel. Hear all those people screaming for new technology to make road travel safe? No? Well, they're the same ones that will take this up.
2. "Passengers might board a capsule at a local bus station and wake up in another city on the other side of the country, or planet, after a road, air and rail journey during which they didn't leave their seat." They don't seem to realise the blindingly obvious point that this is making air travel *worse*. Air travel already involves sitting in a seat for too long. Why would I opt for a mode of travel that exchanges a few minutes of having to be polite to people in the aisles for one that involves several hours more in the same damn seat?
3. If you want to see just how off-their-faces unrealistic this is, look no further than this sentence: "Clip-Air's researchers, who are also looking into the possibility of using biofuels or liquid hydrogen as alternative fuels, have already initiated some contacts with the aerospace industry." Oh, great! You're launching publicity for a total redesign of the entire global air freight and passenger industry and you've *already* initiated some contacts with the aerospace industry??? Really??? What made you do that so soon??? And looking into hydrogen as a fuel source for this is basically admitting, "It's so far off the page that we might as well throw in any futuristic-sounding crap we can." If you're doing this seriously, get one thing right at a time. Don't complicate it by also trying to introduce a fuel that no-one else has managed to make work yet.
People who consider themselves "aviation visionaries" (yes, an actual term used in the article) always, always get excited about this kind of thing for no good reason. They *think* people want revolutionary concepts that change how they board planes and let them work out then drink themselves silly in a trendy bar while they're in flight. What people *actually* want are revolutionary new concepts that cut the cost of air travel.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
"A passenger pod is not heavy because it does not contain fuel, engines, avionics, etc., so in case of an accident it can be ejected and land on parachutes."
It contains the passengers (the payload) and is one of the major structural components of the plane, so it is heavy anyway. And if it has to be structurally sound enough to be ejected and land it will be even heavier. Big parachutes for heavy loads are not easy or lightweight too.
Besides, air travel is very safe already and this wouldn't change anything about crashes during take-off and landings.
I mean, yes, do designs and try to sell them. I doubt someone will buy this though.
Forget Hyperloop! In several years, Elon will have perfected RAAS (Rocket as a service, if you will), and we'll be able to call them from our Hololens', and have them arrive like Ubers'!
This is an intersting idea, and it would be fun to see it developed further, but this line really stuck out.
"Shall we continue to get killed because it is easier to produce aircraft with a design from 1950s?"
Bullshit. I'm not saying some improvement in air crash survivability isn't a good thing, but the idea that people are regularly dying because their aeroplane can't disassemble in midair and parachute them to the ground it frankly offensive to all the engineers who have worked over the years to make large scale commercial flying unbelievably safe.
Total number of air craft fatalities worldwide in commercial flight has been significantly less than 1000 per year for the last couple of decades. Something like 3.6 billion passenger journeys will be completed in 2016 (IATA estimate).
Safety is the single worst reason to throw away a tried and tested basic design that is fantastically safe and replace it with a much more complicated and new system.
Paul Leader
In an airplane the fuselage is not some simple shell for aesthetics or aerodynamics. It is a structural component, bearing weight. The skin, barely a mm thick carries load. The containers on the other hand are designed to carry load themselves. They are all rated to be stacked, each container can bear the load of some dozen containers stacked on top of it. That is why these containers are so strong, made with steel. Such strong containers are heavy. Too heavy to be used in air cargo economically.
We could design containers, with lower strength specs to lower the weight. This could help in unloading and reloading of cargo planes. Turn around time is very important. Such containers exist, but they are not as ubiquitous as intermodal containers and they have not taken over the industry sector the way they have taken over ship/rail/truck borne cargo.
As for passenger carrying cargo, it is so cheap to ask passengers to disembark and reboard, the cost and weight of carrying them makes it uneconomical.
The value of avoiding disembarkation is well known. In Europe, some passenger trains move from one gauge in the west to another gauge in the east changing the wheel gauge on the move. As the railcar moves along, a special section of the track, lifts the car off the truck, unlocks the wheel, slides the wheel along the axle to reduce/increase the gauge, relock the wheel, lower the railcar on to the trucks. (trucks = bogies for the brits). At 15 mph. Even locomotives change their gauge on the move! So the value of avoiding disembarkation is known, but still these pod ideas have not taken hold.
It is a nice interesting student project. Earlier graphics was expensive and we used to depend on Popular Mechanics for such crazy ideas in nice looking pictures. Now with blender and maya and photoshop anyone can create them. That is all.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The obstacle to this new invention is that the whole obsolete airport and airline infrastructure must be rebuilt. So what? Shall we continue to get killed because it is easier to produce aircraft with a design from 1950s?
Yes please. Our lives aren't worth that much. Please spend the money on road safety instead rather than bankrupting an industry that is already described as the safest form of travel.
Editor mixed up 2 schools. This project is from EPFL (in Lausanne) as you can see from the project link and not the ETHZ (in Zurich) as stated.
Every 1-2 years (or after a major air crash) someone, somewhere suggests this idea. Which amounts to:
1. Aircraft to become more complex (e.g. heavy, expensive, failure-prone, carrying less passengers per unit of fuel)
2. The idea works only when aircraft is at high enough altitude for the 'chutes to work reasonably. So no profit in takeoff and landing (when most of crashes happen)
3. The idea works only when aircraft is slow enough for the "bus" and it's precious contents to survive aerodynamic hit and turbulence without having shape and controls of an airplane, rocket or something similar. So no profit at marching speed, either.
And yes, 2 and 3 pretty much cover the whole flight.
4. Bombs inside and missiles outside still invariably fatal.
Sorry. Back to fighting terrorism, training pilots and engineering better avionics.
This plane concept has nothing to do about safety. Fatal crashes are few and fatal crashes where a detaching pod with parachutes would save you are quite rare even among fatal crashes. Bombs, mountain crashes, landing/lift-off crashes etc are unaffected. Which is why it is not the raison d'être of this design. The second part of the summary is the relevant one, it would allow you to change the configuration of the plane by attaching different cargo/passenger/etc pods and even allow pods from different companies on the same plane. But, yeah, it is a far-fetch concept since to take advantage of what feels to me not "revolutionary" benefit, it would require huge infrastructure changes. Nice university project though.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I've heard something similar proposed several times, for example Airbus Patent Shows Modular, Removable Aircraft Cabins, and the same issues are discussed every time.
The primary driving factor in the design of passenger aircraft in recent decades has been getting the cost per passenger down, so a solution against which can be said "the whole obsolete airport and airline infrastructure must be rebuilt" has pretty much zero chance of happening, since that would be somewhat expensive.
As far as the safety aspect, the idea of having a detachable passenger compartment that can separately parachute-land in the event of a disaster is also not new, and the obvious issues mentioned in that article seem to apply here also. Big increase in cost to achieve a questionable and at best marginal overall safety improvement in what is already the safest for of transport is just dumb.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see people working on this kind of thing, and I don't want to be that guy that dismisses every futuristic conceptbecause of a few practical obstacles, but I do wish tech journalists would present such things in a more realistic way. Lines like "... and his team are preparing to build a small-scale Clip-Air prototype. They have already initiated some contacts with the aerospace industry" tries to make it sound like this is something on the path to possibly being implemented, whereas the reality is "contacts with the aerospace industry" might not mean much at all.
Oh no... it's the future.
Scenario 1: Pilot crashes the plane to the mountain. No help from pods as there was no accident.
Scenario 2: Big country fires a missile to destroy the plane. Unlikely for the pods to help as whole system probably explodes.
There are some scenarios where this can help. E.g. if pilot realizes that he has lost control of the plane and there is enough altitude for parachutes to open.
So what is needed is some statistics. How big impact could this really have?
Then we should compare this to some alternative methods, e.g. robot pilots, more strict airplane control etc. And compare cost vs. amount of saved lives. It should also be remembered that new technology always has some unexpected problems, so people will get killed because of this technology if it is taken into use.
Most commercial aircraft accidents happen at take-off and landing and at under 2,000ft altitude (bird strikes, wind shear anomalies, etc). Standard parachute systems don't have time to deploy and dissipate sufficient velocity before impact to be of any worth. The only way a modular system as described could be effective for the majority of scenarios that involve very low altitudes with current tech is if the modules were equipped with a computer-controlled rocket braking/thruster system and automated landing system.
In the US the one area of air transportation infrastructure that is both in the worst state and probably one of the largest factors in air transport safety is the air traffic control system. It's been a mess since at least the 1970s. There were still vital systems and equipment that dated from the '70s in service up to the late '90s (and there may still be some in service I'm unaware of).
There have been a few half-hearted attempts to throw money at the problem but, as usual, most of the money is squandered on upgrade projects in the hands of the usual politically-connected cronies and the money mysteriously evaporates in endless cost-overruns, delays, and failures to deliver.
If the goal was actually to make a relatively large improvement in air safety and a wise appropriation of funds (if they are tied to effective and pragmatic oversight combined with meaningful penalties), the US' air traffic control system would be a great place to start.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
At a rate of about 700 deaths for about 3 billion passengers (both yearly averages). That's less than 0.3 ppm.
What industry would completely redesign itself and increase its costs by even 1% (this would probably be more like 20% plus the fix cost of the changes) to reduce its failure rate to below the current 0.3ppm (and then again, not necessarily to zero, as the last few year's crashed are not related to the kind where this system would help)?
This is merely interesting as an exercise for students. Studying concepts not viable in the industry is a laudable, but idiosyncratic purpose of academia; a bit like Smalltalk for instance.
I'm also not surprised it was made into an autoplaying video idiots share on Facebook.
if it took off and landed from solar runways.
You know, combine the most promising technologies available.
The insane alt-right sure has been emboldened by Trump's vanity run for the Presidency. I wonder what you morons are going to do when America rejects your cheeto-messiah.
The Fairchild Pack Plane, from 1950: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Shall we continue to get killed because it is easier to produce aircraft with a design from 1950s?
Man, how often HAVE you been killed in airplane crashes, anyway?
Such deaths are very rare, considering. If we put even a fraction of the level of effort discussed into, say, removing just 10% of the in-hospital deaths caused by medical mistakes, that would save thousands and thousands more lives every year. Not that the two areas are mutually exclusive - it's just that death in airliner crashes remain vanishingly rare. And considering how many of those are the result of crazy/religious wackadoos deliberately killing those onboard, it's not clear how making the passengers ride in pods would actually solve that part of the problem anyway.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The pod-plane makes a lot of sense for cargo. That should be looked at separately from the case for people transport.
The story underplays the importance of the standardized shipping container when it says it was the most important development in commerce in the last century. By many measures, it is the most important development in commerce, ever. But it is of little use in air freight. But aerodynamic shipping containers ---pods--- that could travel long distances at high speeds without repacking would not only compete successfully with containers for certain goods, but would open new, distant markets for a number of perishable goods. When the shipping distance between pod of large items sealed in Singapore and pod opened in New York City is reduced to overnight, then new things become possible and everyone comes out ahead.
Burt Rutan's WhiteKnight/SpaceShipOne demonstrates we already have the technology to do pod-planes (and much more!). FedEx already demonstrates one successful business model for overnight freight--- using a kind specialized pod.
I expect to see pod-planes for general cargo before 2025.
I thought an apostrophe was there to warn you that an s was coming, not notify you that you just missed one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Saw a similar concept on Gizmag a few years back except that the pod was loaded onto the fuselage where the current passenger compartment is
Apparently, this showed up as an Airbus patent last year (presumably to "fix" the issue of embark/disembark time of a big plane like an A380).
Also saw a similar idea presented in the First International Paper Airplane Contest (sponsored by Scientific American back in 1967).
Pods are probably a better idea if combined with the idea of a containerized multi-modal cargo. Imagine if you can board a pod on a rail transport at a city center. The pod moves by rail to an airport where the passengers do not have to exit the pod and the pod is loaded on a plane (maybe with other pods). After landing at the destination airport, the pod is unload to rail, and moved by rail to the final destination (presumably another city center). Of course, your luggage travels underneath to your final destination.
Then airport can then be pretty far from the city center (e.g., I'm thinking about Denver International Airport from my ex home town), but you can have the convenience of using transport hubs near the city center.
What if you just follow the instructions?
1) Light Fuse.
2) Get Away.
3) Pull Ripcord.
4) ????
5) Prophet!
No brain, no pain.