You Can't Get There From Now

already for you. You You did. You're either very forgetful or asking a hypothetical question set up a deeper conversation. It was a rhetorical device. I admit I am not above such things. We wanted to talk about the future of air travel in this episode and kind of talk about, you know, why is air travel even something that we're thinking about? Why, what's important about it? And what are the various barriers to making it, you know, more awesome more awesome. I might be different than both of you

and that I straight up hate air travel. I don't um I don't hate it so much that I refused to get on a plane like some of those people. I mean, we know somewhere around here who We've got a couple of people who work at hell Stuff Works who have phobias that they deal with and no no judgment about that. That's very understandable, because I I almost

share it. I just very much dislike it. I Uh, it's kind of like you know, asking me if I would ride in the trunk of a car if it was my only option to get to where I needed to go. I mean, I guess I would do it, but you wouldn't be happy, but you really wouldn't be excited about. I am fine with air travel. I have no problem with it whatsoever. I actually I can find flying on an airplane to be relaxing. I can fall asleep before we end up taxing to par take off.

But but on the other hand, on the other hand, I hate everything else about it, Like I don't. I find actually getting the most stressful thing for me is just getting to the point where I'm at my gate. That's actually the most stress Well, the security checks these days, and the fact that in the Atlanta airport you have to travel approximately forty seven miles before you ever get to the gate that you need to get to. That also helps. Uh So non Euclidean design of airport certainly

doesn't help. Yeah, though, there's a wonderful comedy factor to the narration of the between terminal train. Oh, the plane train is what it's called now, and I wish I were making that up. There's some there's some great voice voice acting actually, but I'll have to play for you, guys. My wife found a sound clip of the old plane train, which was in the early days of the Atlanta Airport, voiced by apparently a Cylon for the original Billstar Galactica

series that had that kind of robotic voice. May like, by your command, we're not moving the concourse. B I didn't do the buy your command part, but you get my point anyway. You know, there are some problems with air travel, even on a perfect flight, right, I mean, there's just our biases, but they're sort of actual problems. Yeah.

We we've gotten to a point where, I mean, it's it's kind of it's still amazing to think that we're able to travel anywhere in the world with within you know, a fraction of the time it would have taken a century ago. I mean, obviously that is amazing. Yeah, you can. You can get to the opposite side of the globe within about twelve hours of travel, which is again like unthinkable. I mean earlier generations would have thought this was amazing that we can travel from one point to another so

relatively quickly. But I mean there's still improvements to be had. In fact, if you look at some of commercial air flight, we're not traveling as quickly as some aircraft used to travel. So we want to look at the future of air travel and kind of look at it. Well, everything from can we get to point A to point B? From point A to point B faster? Uh? And how much fuel are we using? What is the environmental impact of that? Is there any way of making aircraft more efficient so

that we don't use as much fuel? Obviously, energy is always something we're thinking about here on this this podcast, right because our needs for energy are just going to continue to rise over time, and so we have to be smarter about the ways we we end up getting at energy. Well, okay, let's start with energy. Um I am no physicist sist, but obviously professional that it takes a lot more energy to move something through the air than to move that same amount of mass just along

the ground, uh in general. Yeah, yeah, I mean without it falling. Yes, although this is part of why airplanes are so keen these days on getting as many people as is physically possible crammed into a single airplane, because it becomes a lot more efficient the more people you're conveying from one place to another. From a cost perspective, from a you know, you think of it as the

number of miles per passengers. I mean, you know, if if you're if you're thinking about it, a plane might burn like a gallon of fuel every second, which is a whole bunch of fuel. But if you even that out to about five hundred passengers, that that's you know, that's really you're you're getting like a hundred miles to the gallon, right, Yeah, So it's it's a little different from looking at a car. You know, in a car, we tend to just think of how far can this

car go on a full tank of gas? Like that tends to be the way we think about mileage, uh in in as far as regular car vehicle type stuff goes. But if you're talking about aircraft, then we start looking at, well, how many people can it carry? For um, it's point of origin to its destination and how much fuel is it burning, and then you kind of figure out the efficiency based on both of those things, not just how much fuel did it burn, but how many people was

it able to carry? Right um And there's there's more complications. Basically, all of this is really complicated to discuss because because planes don't use the same fuel that cars do, UM and so all of the all of the emissions are going to be different, and your efficiency is going to vary widely based on different aircraft. Also, as it turns out, guys um chemical companies aren't really excited about publicizing their

proprietary formulas. I don't know if you've ever heard about this, but they're a little bit secretive about their secret formula. I've been familiar with this ever since my first trip to KFC, when I discovered that proprietary secrets are something they take very seriously. When I sit there and I say, I've identified seven out of your eleven secret herbs and spices, and then they just from the building masks came out ugly. And as it turns out, the people in the aircraft

industry are almost as intense about it. So yeah, I imagine they're not super forthcoming about, say like exactly what the fuel efficiency standards of their vehicles are and uh yeah, exactly what kind of emissions come out of it as a result. Yeah, and you can you can check out there's a few governmental websites that will talk a little bit about, um, really really basic concepts of of averages across standards. So so you know, you can you can look it up and say that a jet fuel emits

some nine point six of carbon dioxide per gallon burned. Um, So then you have to extrapolate that by how many gallons are burned on a typical flight, and then figure out how many flights are there on a typical day. And yeah, this gets complicate. And also only that, but I mean aircraft can burn different amounts of fuel depending

upon on how much weight they're carrying. Oh absolutely, and how you know how long the distance is, how long they spend at an optimum speed versus the takeoff and landing, like the weather conditions are like, um, all sorts of stuff like that will go into that number. You know, on on an average comparison, your your you know, automobile is going to emit some eight point nine kilograms of carbon dioxide per gallon burned. And yes, but you're also

not talking about the same kind of gasoline. Jet fuel is kerosene based. It's it's kerosene or UM or naphtha UM plus some other hydrocarbons purified to remove various contaminants up to an including like water. As it turns out, crystals device are really bad if they get into your jet engine. UM and plus a few additives to prevent

stuff like a corrosion and static build up UM. You know, as opposed to to to auto gas or mo gas, which is the kind of aviation term for automobile fuel, which is patrol neum gasoline modified with some ethanol to burn cleaner, had to increase the octane and and another couple of additives to prevent a couple of things. Okay, but jet fuel emissions, we're not just talking about like

a carbon problem right there. There's some other contaminants, right Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that wind up in jet fuel emissions. And a study out of m I T just recently found that it's it's it's pretty toxic stuff. They were looking at flight paths and wetter weather patterns and um premature deaths

in various areas that have roots in air pollution. You know, you're you're talking about deaths you know, with with cardiovascular respiratory problems, lung cancer, stuff like that, and jet plane

emissions can kill about ten thousand people every year. Wow. Wow, according to according to m I. T Um, Yeah, just looking at at the way that these these areas of increased risk of death from car de vascular from air pollution related causes are turning up ten thousand deaths per year in areas that receive a high concentration of jet fuel emission. And yeah, well okay, okay, for for for the record, ships are a lot worse and can cause

as many as sixty people to die every year. And I did not find a number on cars, so that is completely unhelpful. But that's a lot. And some of this might be impacted by something as simple as regulatory measures like filtering out sulfur, which could cost as little as five cents a gallon according to some researchers. Yeah, keeping in mind that these these aircraft have hundreds of gallons of gas. But still, yes, when you compare that

to deaths. It's still cheap. Yeah, if you could, if you could save people from from dying from the inhalation of particulates and the development of these deadly diseases, then yeah, And you brought up something else I just want to address really quickly before we move on, which is that the idea that there are other vehicles that also create harmful emissions that can contribute to health hazards and even contribute to someone dying earlier than what they normally would have.

We totally understand that, we do understand there are other vehicles that do this, but that you can't. You can't say because these other things do this, then this isn't a problem. Clearly, it's a problem that we need to look at across multiple types of vehicles. So, um, we're focusing today on on aircraft because we could go on for a very long time about many different kinds of travel,

and probably will in future episode. Yes, exactly. So I just wanted to bring that up so that we don't get the people who respond with, well, if vehicles contribute to x number and aircraft are only x number, then why are you saying let's let's fix you know, just the aircraft at the expensive vehicles. That's not what we're saying. Sure. Also, air travel is on the rise in the United States.

It saw a I don't have the number in front of me, but I remember seeing like a one point three increase from twelve, you know, which which over the course of several years worldwide. That was just in the US could be pretty significant. And noise pollution is is a thing too with aircraft. A couple of studies published in the British Medical Journal in October um we are recording this podcast in November found that people who lived with higher levels of aircraft noise a k a. Closer

to airports had increased risks of stroke and other cardiovascular diseases. Um. And that's after adjustment for stuff like socioeconomic status and demographic factors. Air pollution close to closeness to roadways. And you know, we we talked a little bit about noise pollution in our wind Turbine episode, so if if you guys want to go back and listen to that one.

But basically, noise pollution of any kind can cause stress and sleep disturbance through this kind of nasty, self perpetuating cycle of what's called annoyance and is actually more serious than it sounds when you just say it like I'm annoyed, but but it's it can it can lead to chronic stress, which is bad. Yeah, yeah, but which we've talked about also in previous podcasts about how stress can really impact your quality and uh and length of life as it

turns out. So you know, these are these are all things that we could look at to say, well, the future of air travel needs to address certain things like how efficient the aircraft are, how quickly they travel, how much noise they produce, how many types of emissions do

they emit can we limit that? And and some of these questions are really complicated already, And then you complicate them more by saying, well, what's the best approach because obviously we don't have a magic solution to addressing all of these issues at once. Some of them you're going to have to weigh against others and decide what's the most important. But let's talk about some of the some

of the proposals we've seen for making aircraft more efficient. Yeah, some groups, for example, NASA have started to get heads together basically and say, well, let's look at aircraft design and see what we can do to actually fix these problems instead of just you know, worrying about them. Yeah, didn't they put together a whole like report on outlining some some good future guidelines for how to get planes to get safer. And in two thousand nine, NASAs Aeronautics

Research Mission Director, it's Integrated Systems Research Program. Does that not have like an acronymic that that has is? See

that's perfect? The NASA armed is yeah, there we go, alright, alright, NASA NASA there they released UM, the Environmentally Responsible Aviation Project UM, and this basically it was to challenge people to come up with new aircraft configurations that they could deploy by UM they've got to and right now on their website they've got a list of goal that include reducing aircraft drag by eight PERCENTUM, reducing aircraft weight by

ten percent, reducing specific fuel consumption of aircraft engines by fi reducing ox sides of nitrogen emissions by seventy five percent, reducing aircraft noise by one eighth compared to current standards. And I think those were based on aircraft as they were measured in n but that's I think not a whole lot different than now, because a lot of the aircraft that are in service have been around for a

long time. Even the ones that have been constructed, you know, relatively recently, were in the engineering planning department for years before they were ever unveiled to the public. So even if you were to say, oh, but the such and such plane only came out in two thousand four, so clearly it's well, there's chances that planes at least ten years of testing exactly. Um. Yeah, And so I wanted to talk about a few things ideas I've seen in

conjunction with the response to this project. Uh. And some of some of these are aerodynamic redesigns to the body of airplanes, because it turns out this matters a whole lot. It's not just your engine, but it's um dealing with this thing, the drag coefficient, the resistance that your plane

is experiencing as it's flying. And I guess you're also trying to increase the lift to drag ratio um to lower the amount of energy you need and therefore probably also the emissions you create when you're flying through the air. Your engines don't have to work as hard if the drag is lowered yeah. UM. And so one of the cool things I saw was the idea of the boxed wing or the closed wing system. Have you ever seen this?

I have not seen pictures of it. I read a little bit about it, and it it basically made my mind go by the way it's um. On one hand, it seems really said bowl. It's so normally imagine a plane body like a passenger jett to bowing. You know, it's got wings sticking out. Well, Apparently, when a plane is flying through the air at its maximum efficiency, you know, high speed UM, there is this phenomenon known as wingtip

vortices UM. So at the ends of the wings there's this turbulent spiraling of air that creates drag on the airplane as it's moving through UM. Because in general, turbulence is bad. And so one idea is that you have these things called winglets wingtip devices, and they try to cut down on wingtip vortices by you've probably seen something like this before. Instead of just the wings ending, they've got like a little little thing flips up on the end, and so that helps cut down on that sum, but

it's still there. Well, what if you um sort of extend that idea and just keep those winglets coming up intil they come all the way around and form a closed loop system of wings. Well, apparently Locke and Martin offered a design like this in response to the e r A program. Yeah. Um, and so it looks I don't know how else to describe it. I mean, it looks like it's got a boxy wing. Other people throughout history have tried to do this with like say, loop wings,

like ring wings. They come out and they're sort of a circle around the plane. Um, this would be one that like modern passenger planes, the wings are are built right into the fuselage. So, um, it's not like a loop around the fuselage. But I don't know if that's feasible for any reason or not. All Right, So so that's what that's what Lockheed's been working on. What what other designs are out there? Um, Well, there's here's one. You ever seen a B two bomber. Yeah, yeah, So

there's this thing about it. It's kind of different than the body of most passenger planes, and that most of them have this kind of uh, you know, cucumber tube in the middle and then wing A B two is what's referred to as a flying wing. Yeah, it's a flying wing design. So the whole thing is a wing. And why does that help. Well, the wings are the part of the plane that gives you lift, because a plane stays in the air essentially by throwing air down off the bottom of it. So is it is it

moves through the air very quickly. It's um, it's throwing air downward, and this lifts the body of the plane up. Now, the more flat surface you have along the bottom of the plane to to sort of get the oncoming air to rush under, the more lift you have. And so a flying wing design helps give you a better lift

to drag ratio. UM. Now, apparently there are a lot of difficulties with the design like this, like it might be harder to make the plane stable, but of course we've got some smart people out there who are aeronautics engineers and UM. The thought is if you could create a passenger plane that had a fuselage built into the

wing design instead of separately, that would also help increase efficiency. UM. A similar plan to this is a sort of what's been called a blended wing design, which is sort of like somewhere in the middle between what a modern passenger plane looks like today and that flying wing totally flat design where there's sort of a still a separate fuselage,

but it's more evenly built into the wing. Um So those are some new body designs, but also there are a lot of things just about the more specific individual parts of the plane that can help improve efficiency while it's in midflight. For example, one thing is, uh what

I've read about is called hybrid laminar flow control. So when air moves over a plane or where really when anything's moving through a fluid, there are two different ways that it that the fluid outside like air or liquid or whatever, can move over the vehicle, and it can move over it in turbulent flow, which usually happens at higher speeds, and that means it's it's getting all churned up and it's moving in a lateral direction. Um Or it can move in lamin or flow, which is sort

of like smooth parallel motion. And so when you're rushing through air, the air that flows over you is going to be I guess smooth when you first encounter it, but as it moves along the surface at high speeds, it's more likely to become turbulent. But um lamin or flow control on the outside of a plane is designing the surface of the plane to try to reduce this, to make the air flow over the plane as smooth

as possible for as long as possible. And so does this have to do with with materials science figuring out the best materials to create this laminar flow. It could, but it also could just have to do with like designing the skin of the airplane, like you could. Apparently designing it with holes placed in certain places can allow suction of air down through that offset some of this

like outward spiraling of air that creates the turbulence. And uh, in any case that I know this is complicated engineer stuff, but basically what it is is it's designing the skin of an airplane to make it flow more smoothly. Okay, so we've got all these things like that, and these redesigns could help increase the efficiency of airplane steering flight.

Another one might just be like, well, surely you can boost your lift to drag ratio if you just make bigger wings, right, But there are also some limits on that because the bigger your wings are, the stronger you have to make them, and then that adds weight. So there is some optimal optimalization of of weight to Yeah. Well not only that, but I mean there's a practical issue too, right, Uh so a problem with a lot

of these. Actually, I talked to a friend of mine who studied aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech, and he I was talking to him about this episode, and he pointed out something interesting, which is just that it might be a problem implementing these designs simply because they might be harder to put into operational capacity within existing airports. It might be hard to get them up to airport gates. That sounds so you know, banal as a as an objection,

but it's totally practical though. I mean, like, Okay, so I travel fairly frequently, and I travel on lots of different types of aircraft, and some of the larger aircraft

at the Atlanta Airport. You you realize that if you're going to certain destinations, you're almost always going to have to walk to the very end of the concourse, which, as we said earlier, as approximately forty and miles long, and so uh that's that's you know, you just know it if you're going to certain destinations, because those destinations tend to use certain types of aircraft, Like if I go to Las Vegas or Orlando, I know I'm going to have a long walk ahead of me because they

tend to use tiny They're using larger aircraft for both of those because they're both high traffic destinations. Atlanta, of course, is a big hub city for for air travel. So for anything that's a high you know, a high profile destination that a lot of people are going to and they're changing through in Atlanta, those aircraft tend to be

larger to take as many people as possible. The larger aircraft do not fit into the gate areas that are closer into the middle of the concourse, where it would be the most convenient for the passenger who's just stepping off the train and wants to get on the plane. They fit at the ends of the concourse. That's where they have a little more space for those. So if we're talking about changing the um the design of planes so radically that just the actual profile of the planes,

then that becomes a problem. We've got all this existing infrastructure which has been built over decades and cost billions of dollars collectively just for like a single city. It could be billions of dollars and then you multiply that all the cities around the world that have have, you know, international airports or large domestic airports. This is a huge challenge, you know. I won't go so far as to say

it's a problem, but certainly a challenge. Now. One way of addressing that challenge is to completely rethink the way that we have people get on and off of aircraft. I mean, I don't know about either of you. Have either of you ever flown into an airport where you got off the aircraft onto a set of stairs on a tarmat, Yeah, but only I think it was like once, and I felt like I was someone fancy in the

nineteen sixties when I didn't. Yeah, I did it when I was flying to a very small airport, not very large one, because we had to get on a little plane that was like made out of cell phane apply not tall enough to not tall enough to set the big boy table with all the other planes. Right. Well, I mean that's the sort of thing like, if you're talking about planes that can't fit into the existing infrastructure, we may be looking at doing that sort of thing.

That might be a practical approach, a practical answer to that problem as opposed to, rather than building entirely new airports, are entirely new wings on existing airport, or yeah, or just saying well, this entire concourse is going to go down for renovation and we're going to have half the number of gates that we had. Yeah. There's another cost obstacle, which is simply that airplanes are mega expensive, and they're they're usually designed, I think, to work for a while.

The airplanes that are already out there, nobody's in a hurry to retire them, right, certainly not. And and some of the basic designs that we're using today have been

in use for for thirty years. Yeah. Yeah, And you look at it again, like even going into the point of of prototyping a design, testing it, making sure it's safe, making sure it actually is doing the things you intended it to do, because sometimes people design stuff and when they tested out they realized that it's not as efficient as they thought, or maybe it's even less efficient than than conventional aircraft already are. You have to test all of that, and then once all that is done, assuming

it works, you still have to go into manufacturing. All of this is costly, consestly and it takes a long long time. All that aside, I am excited about these aerodynamic redesigns and I hope that some can be tested and found to be useful and actually put into practice. But I had another idea. Um, so all that was about just body design, aerodynamic redesign. I mean, what about the engines themselves, the part of the plane that does

the flying. We'll sit yourself down, Joe, I got a tale to tell you, Yeah, something about the future of I got. I got a couple of big aeroplane engines. I'll start this off by telling you a little, a little story about how stuff works. So how stuff works. As the office we work in and uh, we used to do this thing every year where we would write an April Fools article to go on how stuff works. That was just a joke and it was just one article out of the hundreds of articles on the site.

And uh, one year, my former editor Chris Palette wrote about a new version of Air Force one that was going to be launched that year that was a hybrid airplane.

And he wrote about the fuel cells that were on the plane and how many batteries there were and the fact that it added so much weight to the plane that it required even more batteries to you know, it was just sort of a joke that was all about how difficult this problem was, and you know, it was a funny little joke, and it went on the website and did well and great. Now we've got people who are working on building hybrid airplanes, and not just an

airplane that can carry a single passenger. We're talking out the application for potentially commercial jets. Woe. Yeah, hybrid. I assume you mean a combination of like gas turbine and electric, well, jet fueled turbine and electric. Yes. So, for example, one of the ones is and this is merely in the concept phase, this is not even prototype phase, but Boeing's Sugar Vault. So Sugar is an acronym. SUGAR stands for

sub sonic ultra green Aircraft Research. So you don't just give a candy bars and let it get really excited. Now you give it a little bit of kisses, give you some sugar butterfly. Um. Yeah. So so this this was one of the the things that came out one of the projects that came out of those discussions at NASA.

NASA sort of approach to an entire team and it was led by Boeing UH to look into how feasible would it be to create some form of hybrid commercial jet And so it's very similar in a way to electric cars or hybrid cars really the kind of cars that you gasoline for some features and then switch over to electric same basic ideas. So anything that would require a great deal of power to operate, So anything like takeoffs, you know that takes a lot of power to get

an aircraft into the air. That would still rely on conventional fuels for aircraft, but then once you've got into a cruising speed, the idea would be to switch over to electric motors as opposed to jet you know, jet fuel engines, and continue to operate using the electric UH power source. And the idea would be that you would

have batteries that would provide the electricity. UH. Ultimately, Boeing says, this would allow you to design aircraft that would consume less fuel on a typical flight that compared to today's conventional aircraft. So that's yeah, that's a huge amount of savings, right. So the design of this aircraft went beyond and again it's a concept, but it went beyond just the hybrid nature of the power source, the engines and the motors.

It also went toward the aircraft's wings, which were designed to create more lift and less drag, just like we've been saying, which would also allow the aircraft to take off earlier than other aircraft, thus also adding to those savings, because if you're say earlier they take it would take less time let's say, or less distance either way you want to put it for them to take off. And again, the goal there's to get them to an altitude where they could switch over as quickly as possible so that

you consumes as little fuel as possible. And although the wings were designed to be very large, they were also designed to fold in on themselves so that you could in theory use existing infrastructure, thus getting rid of that practicality problems talking about the yeah exactly, just to be able to use the existing airports that are already popular

throughout the world. Um. And the timeline they gave for such an aircraft to actually become reality and as opposed to just a concept, would be sometime between twenty thirty and twenty fifty, which sounds a lot like our standard rolling deadline. Yeah, by then we're we'll all reach a singularity, so then we'll be on Mars according to Mars one. But that's not the only hybrid vehicle I can talk about.

There's actually another one I really want to mention because and the reason I want to mention this is because, unlike the Sugar Vault, this one exists like it, It's been built and it's even undergone a test flight on a passenger plane scale. Not a passenger plane scale, but it is. It's it's a design that storetically, theoretically could

be scaled up to commercial jet size. Here it's the d A thirty six E Star two, which was a plane that where they yeah, the engine was built by Siemens and they created an electronic electric series hybrid drive system, and it's actually been built and it's been flown. This is a propeller based aircraft, though not a jet aircraft. Okay, so this is a hybrid plane uses both fuel and electricity. They claim that it could be scaled up for commercial

aircraft use. However, Uh, Whereas the fuel savings on the Sugar Vault are predicted to be at around sev which is incredible, it's much more modest gains with the star to we're talking about twenty gains still better, right, but again not jet engine. It's got an electrically driven motor propeller, so it can possibly be scaled up to aircraft that could carry between fifty two passengers depending upon the design.

So not as large as some more more like a puddle jumper than than your regularly you know, between the puddle jumper and you know, your your standard jets. Cell depends like there's some aircraft out there that have around between eighty and a hundred seats, so it all depends upon the ones you're looking at. It's certainly not nearly as large as something like a seven forty seven, which can carry more than two. If you stack them horizontally,

you can fit one around there. Um and beyond that, there's one other person who has talked about the possibility of a fully electric supersonic jet. Can you guess who would be interested in building a supersonic jet that's completely electric. It's someone that we've talked about before. I'll give you a hint. He's interested in space and electric vehicle. Elon Musk. Yeah,

we're talking Tesla and SpaceX guy. So Elon Musk said, he has some interest in looking into designing such a vehicle, not that he has started to have a concept or anything, just that that was one thing that he would a challenge he would like to try and and meet at some point. Now, keep in mind that Musk has got a lot of stuff on his plate already, including Tesla,

SpaceX and the hyper loop. So how although technically the hyper loops not on his plate, Yeah, I think, and so I don't know how likely it is that he or his engineering team are ever going to seriously look into this. It would be really remarkable to build a fully electric supersonic jet. I mean, creating an electric motor capable of getting an aircraft into the air let alone

going into supersonic speed is pretty hard. Well, yeah, I'd have to imagine there's so many challenges to that, and my guests would be the huge problem is the batteries. That would be enormous city you store all this energy right right, And that was going to be my question for for that savings of the normal energy that we would use that you were talking about with the Sugar vault is you know, batteries aren't charged with magic, They're

they're also charged with energy. And fuel. Well yeah, yeah, and and that's that's what I meant to say and not what I physically say. But but but, I mean, you know, it brings us back to that common um argument that we make about like, well, even if you are plugging something into a wall socket, that's where's the electricity coming from somewhere, right, So if that electricity is

coming from a coal plant that's right down the road. Yeah, it's just it's different kind of fuel, different kind of emissions. But still it's still something that you have to think about. Whereas if that electricity is coming from a solar farm or a wind farm, or some dude peddling a bicycle really fast in the back of the airport, you know that that's different. Joe, She was like, no, man, that guy peddling that bike is just like a coal plant.

Oh you're a tough man, Joe. Alright, So um, but you know, I want to talk about something besides just electric and hybrid vehicles too, all right, So we we talked about the hybrids, the idea of electricity and jet fuel. We've talked about the pie in the sky electric vehicle that has no parameters around it other than the fact that Elon Musk said one of the things he wanted it to be vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. Why don't you just add another impossible thing and it's going to

be the size of an aircraft carrier. Yeah. No, he wants a jet that could take off vertically and land land vertically, meaning that you know it could It wouldn't need you wouldn't need an airstrip. You could just take off straight from wherever you were. Yeah. But even the planes that are capable of vertical takeoff and landing, like say the Harrier jump jet or the V two Offsprey, they're not They don't like to do that. You want

to avoid it at all, crossed. Yeah, but this is that, you know, Musk is like, go bigger, go home though. So but the other thing I wanted to talk about was the solar impulse. You guys have heard about this, right, the solar powered airplane. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so solar powered aircraft. That's one of those things that when you first hear it, you think, well that's crazy. Well you think there's a catch. They're like, okay, so they use gas to get up in the air or something. Um, this is a solar power.

It's a solar powered aircraft. It's pretty awesome. Uh. Once I start describing it, you're going to realize, Oh, that's pretty awesome, but not practical. So it's a one seater plane. So there's striper strike one. Yeah, because I mean, obviously, if you're going to have something that's using solar power, you are limited by how much energy you can get at any given time. Even if you have batteries on this thing. The batteries can only supply so much energy.

But let's be clear to not downplay this achievement. This is not just something that we're talking about as a concept. Has completed a flight across the United States in stages, right, and it's the plan is to have it fly all the way around the globe. Um. So it's I mean,

it exists, and it's it's an incredible achievement. It's just one of those things where are you realize that while this is an incredible achievement, it also kind of illustrates the actual, yeah, the problem of things like the efficiency of solar panels, as well as trying to come up with a design for an aircraft that is truly efficient and is not emitting any greenhouse gases. So what you're saying is you don't think the solar impulse means that

there's ever going to be a solar powered passenger. Well, let me give you a few more examples of what this thing does, all right. So, so it's a one seater plane, and part of that is to really control exactly how much weight this aircraft has, because weight is one of those really important things about you know, the more weight you have, the more power you need to

get that thing going through the air. Um, it's got a really large wingspan to try and maximize lift, and it also the design is there to minimize drag, just like we've been talking about, and that also gives it a little bit more surface area for solar panels. Yeah, it's got more than eleven thousand solar panels on it. Yeah, this, by the way, is giving a probably just enough tristy to fly it at regular cruising speed, maybe with a comfortable margin, but not a huge amount over over that.

And with a plane that size, you're talking about a light sport craft which is is going to only be going, um, a very small fraction of what a jet plane. You want to know how fast the sucker goes do your car goes faster? Actually, yeah, your car at idle can go from now it's it's forty three miles per hour average flying speed or seventy kilometers per hour. That's that's the average flying speed that's on the slow end for a light sport craft. Of those those can generally go

up to UM. I guess like autobonn speeds like like maybe like a hundred and thirty miles per hour is what you're normally going to hit. This thing flies so leisurely that you can get to where you're going faster in a car. UM it's got it's got a maximum altitude of about seven thousand nine feet or and uh yeah it just um it flies by so or power and and by batteries so that if if it's overcast and you're not you're not flying in an altude high

enough to be over the clouds. So if it's overcast, your your batteries can maintain flight as well as if it you know, if it's nighttime, you could still fly this thing. Um And in fact that's important for a flight that's going to go around the globe and it's not always going to have full exposure to the sun, not unless you timed it extremely carefully, right, So you have to remember, like these these solar panels like lots of stops, and you have lots of aircraft carriers between

California and Asia. Um so, Joe to your question, like, could this ever be a commercial aircraft? No, I mean the limitations are just too great. Are Our efficiency for solar panels is pretty low we're talking, right, and it's I think really good for solar panels is usually like efficiency is like is like in the field, that's considered a really good goal posts, right, And in the lab

we've gotten up to a blazing efficiency. And that's an extremely hypothetical situation, right, it's to a point where you would never see that ever. And keep in mind again that's under ideal conditions. So efficiency under ideal conditions, then you have other things that are not percent efficient. I mean, your drive train is never going to be a hundred

percent efficient. I think that they calculated that out of all the potential energy this aircraft could, in theory gather if everything worked perfectly, the actual amount of energy that goes into operating the plane is something like twelve So that means you've got a twelve percent efficiency ultimately for this aircraft, which is not great. And even if you were to increase the efficiency of the solar panels, you

can only do that so much. And adding the extra weight and size of the aircraft would make it like the problem is that that extra weight and size would rapidly go well beyond whatever extra capacity you had by bumping up that solar panel EFFICI and see, so it does not look like it would ever be an effective

way of of creating a commercial jet aircraft. Yeah, and even if it's really light, I don't imagine you could just keep making the wings infinitely longer and eventually you have some struct you have some metal fatigue already with regular aircraft. And I read that apparently the solar impulse, when you factor in all the efficiency problems, uh, is ultimately about as powerful as the Right Brothers plane. Yeah.

So you wouldn't expect to fly on an aircraft powered by the Right Brothers engine that would allow you and your closest friends to hop on over to the Bahamas. Uh. Yeah. At the same time, I just want to say once more that just because this thing doesn't do the thing we're asking about, it's still pretty amazing. What the fact that it was. You know, it's truly a feat in engineering. It's amazing that people were able to have it work.

You know. I don't mean to take anything away from the people who worked on the project, um, but yeah, it's it's just not a solution to commercial aircraft. That doesn't mean that it won't teach us lots of valuable things, right, But I've got a better idea I think, actually, which is a wind powered aircraft. Because you've got all this wind coming at you when you're flying. If you just put some like wind turbines right next to the jet engines, Yeah,

they got wind turbines. People just looking at like this is totally confusing me. Well, I mean technically, that's that's what supersonic planes use to ignite the fuel in their jet and scramjets. Scramjets. Yeah, you know that that brings us to the concept of supersonic I'm glad that we were able to segue seamlessly. Then that's dead right now, I mean not entirely. I mean for commercial jets right now, it's not it's definitely not what people are looking at.

I don't mean for the military. I mean like commercially like supersonic passenger jets. Is that just the thing in the past, or is there any future? It's it's tough, all right. I think there's a future in the sense that there's certainly a do ire for it from the consumer standpoint, right, I mean if you are told, right, if you're told like, well, if you fly on a standard aircraft, it's gonna tell you eight hours to get

from New York to London. But then you're told or you could jump on this other aircraft, it's going to take you three and a half hours. Yeah, the Concorde. Uh so that yeah, we of course there was the supersonic commercial jet, the Concorde. There are only twenty of them ever built, I believe. And uh it was a premium customer aircraft, right, so like take the highest amount you would ever pay for a first class ticket and add about that ticket. That's how much your average ticket

was on for just a ride on the Concorde. It had a capacity of a hundred passengers and for a while it was operating at capacity, so it was fairly profitable for a while. But the aircraft, uh suffered some some major setbacks. For one, the economy of jet fuel began to change over time, and that began to impact

the bottom line. For another there were obviously, there was the terrible tragedy in Paris where the Concorde UH completely was completely destroyed when it was I think it was on takeoff when it uh it collided with something and UH like I think a piece of the jet broke off and ended up a catastrophic failure and absolute terrible tragedy that impacted the entire industry, not just the Concorde

but the entire commercial airline industry. UM. And then there were other things that happened that got the f a A and other organizations interested in making sure that aircraft were at certain levels of safety, and that would have meant retrofitting the entire fleet of Concords, which would have cost millions of dollars. Ultimately, the Concorde program was shelved. But if you're curious how fast it could go. So your average commercial jet travels at a speed of around

five right, that's that's average UM. Now cruising average cruising speed, which is different than say, like takeoff speed exactly. Yes, average cruising speed is about fighter miles prour or a hundred four kilometers per hour. The Concorde traveled at mock two point oh two, which is about one thousand, three hundred fifty miles per hour or two thousand hundred seventy

kilometers per hour. That's that's a decadent. Average travel time was three and a half hours between New York and London, although the fastest travel time between New York and London was two hours, fifty two minutes and fifty seconds. Yeah, that was a kind of a proof of concept. See how fast you could get there? Nose. These are supersonic. That means they go faster than the speed of sound. Yeah. So I want to ask a few questions. So I assumed supersonic jets mean, uh my, get correct me if

I'm wrong. Massive consumption of fuel yeah. Also sonic booms. Yeah, and both of these things are bad. Well, I mean depending upon whom you ask. If you if you are a person who sells jet fuel, you think it's awesome, but no, in general, we consider both of these to be strikes against supersonic jets. So, yes, the Concorde was

a fuel hungry aircraft. It consume more fuel than your regular commercial jets would uh to to operate at that level, and because it had fewer passengers on the concorde than say a seven forty seven would that you're not making back as much. Right, we talked about we talked about the fuel efficiency being thought of in terms of how many passengers you get from point A to point B

plus the distance and everything else in between. If you look at that, the concorde was something like seventeen miles per gallon of fuel per passenger and seven forty seven was like eighty. So that's a big difference. Like, Yeah, you're gonna get there faster, but it's much less efficient, it's gonna cost a lot more in fuel, gonna have a lot more emissions on top of the Yeah, and then uh, now let's talk about sonic booms. All right,

So sonic booms. Now, when you travel through the air and you're traveling at a good speed, you are creating these waves in front of you, all right, And as you start to travel faster, these waves get compressed more and more until you hit about you know, when you break over the speed of sound, you have compressed these waves to a point where they cannot be compressed anymore. And that's where you get the sonic boom now fighter

sonic boom um. No, there's a common misconception that you get the sonic boom when the aircraft goes from sub sonic to supersonic speeds. That's not true. When you get to supersonic speed, the sonic boom is going until you get out of supersonic speed. It's it's a rolling carpet of sonic booms. So, which explains why you're gonna hear it um not only in the place where it a rich nates, but also anywhere along It's if you are anywhere along the path of this aircraft while it's traveling

at supersid speeds when it passes over. Assuming there are multiple things that that factor into this, but assuming the factors are right, you will hear the sonic boom. Those factors include everything from the speed of the aircraft, the size of the aircraft, how high up the aircraft is, how far away it is from you, because if it's not flying directly overhead, that's a that's another difference, UH,

and the temperature of the air. As it turns out, because sound travels at different speeds depending upon the air's temperature. So when we say mock one we're talking about the speed of sound. That's not a standard speed. You know, you have to consider how what the temperature of the air is. That will determine what the actual speed of sound is. So all of these different factors will will

determine whether or not you hear a sonic boom. However, you're probably gonna hear some sonic booms if you happen to be along the pathway of a supersonic jet route. So people in certain villages in England who are along the path of the concord, they started seeing things like the windows and they're houses would keep on vibrating whenever

a jet was flying over. Sometimes the tiles on their roofs would come loose because the sonic booms were creating these concussive little blasts and they build up over time. They weren't they weren't powerful enough to like shatter windows and a go. Sure, but but talk about annoyance. So yeah, that's that's a big one. So it's definitely a problem. I also wanted to bring up the idea of hypersonic

because supersonic is just not fast enough. You But hypersonic now I'm talking about this only so I can compare it against supersonic because hypersonic are these are aircraft that are not meant for commercial use at all. These are military use, fancy military plane, sometimes scientific research, but none of it is for you know, getting your Yeah, you're not gonna be hopping on this to go down to Disneyland. Um,

if you are, then you're an astronaut apparently. But but hypersonic, like the fastest hypersonic jet speed ever was mock twiny. So the Concorde went two point oh two. The fastest jet to ever fly was mocked twiny. Now that was an unmanned aircraft. Was about to say that sounds uncomfortable. Thousand miles per hour, Yeah, thirteen thousand miles per hour by an unmanned Falcon HTV two, which if it were to travel between New York and London, would make that

trip in twelve minutes. Yeah, twelve minutes to get from New York to London. Now this was an unmanned flight. This is a military flight that would be launched from another aircraft. Like the HTV two Falcon was one of those that you would have a secondary aircraft flying through the air. It would be launched from that and then once you got to the right speed, because for scramjet engines to work, you already have to be going what is commonly referred to in the industry as wicked fast.

And then once you reach wicked fast speed, you can you can initiate the scramjet engines right the same theory as the hybrid planes that you were talking about earlier, where you've got a conventional jet engine that's going to bring you up to state exactly yep so um. The fastest speed for manned flight, I hear you ask me, is uh, let me guess, yes, it is the seventy one black Board. Do you know when that record was set? I guess the seventies. That's pretty good. Nineteen seventy six.

Nineteen seventy six was when the fastest manned flight was recorded, and that was in an s R seventy one Blackbird, the successor at least in theory to the U two spy plane. It ultimately would not live longer than we're still using the YouTube. We're not still using the Blackbird. Um. The Blackbird top speed was two thousand, one hundred ninety three miles per hour, which could get between New York and London and a little over an hour and a half if you were to fly at that again, obviously

not a commercial jet. You're talking about spy plane. If you're taking a spy plane to get from New York to London, you're clearly archer and you live in a fantasy universe. The rest of us have to go, well that how is that? I don't discriminate against cartoons, all right, I'd imagine that the fuel costs they're really cut into the peanut and tiny soda can budget snacks are not complimentary on The movie was just biodome. It was terrible

bringing it back, alright. So anyway, yeah, that's that's kind of like an overview of of And now now you were asking, like a supersychature supersie not a near future?

I would say I don't think there's a near future for it, mainly because the costs of operating it and maintaining it are so high and the return on investment is so relatively low that I think it's gonna be a while before we see supersonic jets on a commercial level, and you know, rolled out on a wide a wide level, Like we're not going to see that for you know, several years, a greater amount of efficiency would really be

necessary to make it anywhere near worthwhile. Yeah, I mean it's again, if you if you were if you were looking at the numbers with the Concorde program, it looked at least on paper that it was profitable, and maybe it was, and there were other issues that caused UH cause the program to be shelved. But it's such an expensive thing to even ramp up. And then too, you know, you have to have the clientele there because obviously if it's expensive to maintain, then you have to offset that

cost through the cost of the ticket. Right. It sounds less profitable than applying some of those efficiencies to UH to larger passenger jet engines, right, especially if you could, if you can retrofit an existing fleet with with you know, gradual improvements and then increase your efficiency that way, that one might make way more sense than building out a new fleet of aircraft that are super fast but are

not efficient. So I wish I could say that supersonic commercial jets are right around the corner and soon we're going to be getting to you know, around the world and and no time flat. But I just don't think it's there, maybe in the far future, but not the near future. You've given me sad face. Well now, actually, no, I feel pretty good because I I feel frustrated by a lot of the practical obstacles, but at the same time, I feel excited about the ideas we've just talked about.

Well and see, and the things that all the ideas we talk all the ideas we've talked about are ultimately not only great for improving things like energy efficiency and the environmental impact, ultimately they also are financially um attractive to airlines. So it's not like airlines are necessarily going to drag their feet on making changes to the to their aircraft because if it means that they end up saving money through operational costs, then that's better for the

bottom line. So it's one of those things where these are in alignment, which is that's great, that's fantastic when that happens, because we see one of the problems we see with alternative energy is that often the alternatives are more expensive than what we're using right now, whether that's because they're just well initially initially certainly also you have subsidies that end up offsetting things too. But but that's

one of those issues. Rightly becomes a goodness at the company's heart, right issue, rather than and if you can make it profitable, then obviously it's a lot easier for someone to to want to adopt. Yeah, exactly. And in this case, it looks like that's one of those you know, it's things are coming into alignment. So I think we will see changes over the next couple of decades. But you know, this is a huge industry we're talking about, so rapid change is probably something we're not going to see.

I would say would be gradual, but you know, I'm hoping it will be positive change. Yeah. No, but all this is cool. I'm excited we do all right, So we're gonna wrap up this gushion. Guys, thank you for listening. If you want to join in on the discussion, I recommend you first check out our website f W Thinking dot com because it's awesome. We have blog, post podcast videos up there. Go check that out, and of course you can join in on with us talking about this.

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