Posted on 09/28/2017 6:42:27 AM PDT by Red Badger
A supersonic airliner that flies at three times the speed of sound – and runs on nuclear fusion. Stephen Dowling investigates the challenges of making airliners run on atomic power.
It could whisk you from London Heathrow and have you stepping onto the air bridge at New York’s John F Kennedy airport just three hours later. It would take you in no small comfort – luxuriously so, if you’re in first class – at speeds approaching 2,300mph (3,680km/h), the Atlantic Ocean racing below your feet.
The Flash Falcon, looking like a spacecraft from the video game franchise Halo, is a futuristic peg to fill the hole left by the retirement of the Supersonic Concorde in 2003. No prototypes have been built though – the design so far lives only in the imagination of Spanish designer Oscar Vinals, who also designed a ‘whale-shaped’ giant airliner BBC Future profiled back in 2014.
The Flash Falcon, Vinals’ concept imagines, would carry 250 passengers at Mach 3, in an airframe more than 130ft (39 metres) longer than a Concorde and with a wingspan twice as wide. Its engines would even be able to tilt up to 20 degrees to help the aircraft take-off and land like a helicopter.
At the heart of the Flash Falcon is something even more revolutionary; Vinals' aircraft is designed to fly on nuclear power, with a fusion reactor pumping energy to its six electric engines.
“I think nuclear fusion could be the best future source to obtain great amounts of electric energy,” Vinals tells BBC Future. “At the same time, it’s ‘green’ without creating dangerous waste.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
… and runs on nuclear fusion …Thanks for the laugh.
They hired a pretty good artist to draw lots of pretty pictures. T-S Diagrams? Not so much. But what the heck? I’m ready to invest. Where do I send my check?
Slightly Romulan Bird of Prey-ish.
Portable, controlled nuclear fusion has not yet been demonstrated. Neither intermittent nor continuous. So this is a design based on a fantasy.
All your base are belong to us...
Haven’t seen that one in a while.
One of the issues was the weight of the shielding.
One of the early possibly just just theoretical exhausted radio active exhaust.
A friend of mine learned that lesson with the BlueBird three wheeler. Elio really wanted my money. No way.
I’ll buy one when they actually make one. A deadline goes by every year with nothing to show.
A “tad over-engineered”?
Au contraire, my friend. It has ZERO engineering, just some slick and very goofy artistry.
But I know what you are saying — it looks like it’s from the fertile minds of a Hollywood FX team that never took an aerodynamics course.
Somebody’s been watching too much Anime...
I just read a thread about an electric airliner. Now nuke. I’m sure later in the day there will be a solar jet thread or a plane flying on wind power. A coal plane streaming black contrails??
A bit like Project Pluto.
Solar-Powered Plane Soars to New World Records:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/solar-powered-plane-soars-to-new-world-records/
Dumb concept, with useless blabering and window dressing.
Had they started with a simple nuclear flying slab, capable of lifting just a pilot at 50 mph, their fantasy would have been technically much more credible.
With those forward raking wings, any vibration at Mach 3 would tear them from the fuselage.
At least the debris would be in the Atlantic...
The "Project Pluto/Phoenix" nuclear ramjet engine worked. It was also very dirty. It never flew. They did fly a reactor as a test.
The real problem I see with this lovely aircraft in the OP is that we still don't have a working fusion reactor on the ground ...
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