Science of flight: Boeing’s brightest minds envision the future of aviation
To mark its centennial celebrations, aviation giant Boeing is looking ahead in time. How will aviation technology change in the next 100 years? In this special report, Dan Raley tries to answer this question, with a little help from Boeing’s top researche
mankind’s natural spirit of adventure and its continuous desire to explore the universe, plus Boeing’s ability to create cutting-edge technology that keeps up with ever-changing times, he said. In this case: a space colony. People already are thinking about it.
“Nobody’s really built one of those, but we’ve got some concept work,” Tillotson said. “It’s really how do you do the plumbing, mow the grass, and raise and educate children in an environment like that? There are a lot of details to be worked out and Boeing is the logical company to do the huge majority of that.”
To make this happen, however, Boeing likely will need to create a reusable space plane for transport, one that might rely on hypersonic principles for propulsion. It could double as a commercial airliner and make Earth easier to navigate, too.
Consider the following workday: A Boeing business person boards a morning flight in Los Angeles, rides two hours across the Pacific Ocean to Melbourne or Tokyo, attends a business meet- ing, returns to California that afternoon, and sleeps in his or her bed that night. This is Kevin Bowcutt’s vision of the future.
President Ronald Reagan spoke of something similar in his State of the Union address in 1986, referencing a mythical Orient Express airplane that would ferry people halfway around the world in an hour or two. Reagan’s pronouncement inspired Bowcutt, then a young hypersonics researcher, to pursue this project. He continues to work on it.
Bowcutt is Boeing’s chief hypersonics scientist and a Senior Technical Fellow in Huntington Beach, California. He’s determined to create a hypersonic aircraft that revolutionises travel in outer space and across the planet. Over the past decade, he helped push this concept forward with successful trials using the experimental, unmanned X-43A and X-51A hypersonic vehicles, both of which relied on scramjet engines, or air-breathing propulsion that requires no turbo-machinery.
A hypersonic airplane would fit perfectly into what Bowcutt predicts will be a fully automated world someday, making time an even more valuable commodity.
“You could type in ‘Paris’ on your mobile phone and an unmanned car comes to your house, your phone beeps, and you go out and hop in,” Bowcutt said. “It takes you to the airport and it takes out your luggage, and you get on an airplane or some hypertube-type thing that takes you across the ocean. It’s just wild to think about where all this stuff is going to go.”
That’s providing a car hasn’t been rendered obsolete by then. Dan Newman, a Senior Technical Fellow at the Boeing Philadelphia site, envisions a future in which a rotorcraft lifts off from a residential driveway in a metropolitan area and whisks someone to work or the entire family to a relative’s house for a holiday dinner. Rush-hour traffic and airport congestion are conveniently avoided, not to mention the overall car ride.
This Boeing aircraft that uses vertical flight might resemble a quadcopter, a configuration currently found in unmanned aerial systems or hobby toys, and it might have electrical power distribution instead of gearboxes and drive shafts, creating all sorts of options for rotorcraft design, according to Newman.
As a result, airports and runways might become the exclusive domain of large jetliners that travel across the country or internation- ally, Newman said. Vertiports would be commonplace, constructed on the tops of city buildings or on seaport barges, to service the rotorcraft. Small air- plane use might be eliminated or greatly curtailed because of this. Convenience would be the motivator. Newman thinks all of this is possible.
“The target distance for vertical flight to be valuable is where you take the four-hour car ride and turn it into a 40-minute flight,” Newman said. “Up to 400 miles is where there is valuable time savings with vertical flight, portal to portal. I think the future will include more runway-independent aircraft. We’re Boeing and if it’s going to happen, we’re the ones to do it.”
Jill Seebergh is a Boeing chemical engineer and Senior Technical Fellow in Seattle who specialises in coating materials and processes. She looks for ways to make aircraft more fuel-efficient, environmentally sound and cost-effective to build and operate.
In the future, Seebergh sees a Boeing jetliner parked at the gate with images changing on the exterior. The airplane no longer has a painted livery. Instead, the surface is controlled by a lighting system, perhaps
an active matrix organic light-emitting diode display, or AMOLED, offering the airline’s identifying logo and colors — and maybe an advertisement.
“Picture a high-definition TV or smartphone screen, but one that is flexible and wraps around the aircraft — or spacecraft,” Seebergh said. “You can do livery that way, but you can change it. You can reprogramme it. Maybe there’s a market for advertising, where advertisers pay for two weeks on the tail. There’s a lot of flexibility to change the look. That would be exciting.”
It also might have military applications in platform camouflage.
Seebergh also has a futuristic vision for the airplane interior: a self- cleaning cabin, featuring new technology that kills all surface bacteria, consequently alleviating passenger concerns over germ transmission from fellow travelers in close quarters. That may not be all that far away. Boeing engineers and designers have already built a prototype lavatory that uses ultraviolet light to kill 99.99% of pathogens, thus sanitising all the lavatory surfaces. Jeff Crouch and Jay Carskaden are engineers and Senior Technical Fellows who work in the Seattle area. Crouch deals with the smooth, uninterrupted flow of air over a wing contour or other airplane part (known as laminar flow); Carskaden specialises in engines and propulsion.
Crouch sees a lot of airplanes entering service in the decades t o c o m e but no new airports to support them. To offset future traffic jams, a push could be made to reduce or break up wake turbulence, enabling jets to trail closer to one another and get on the ground quicker, he said. Future aircraft wings might become significantly thinner with longer wingspans and large regions of laminar flow for improved efficiency, he said. Carskaden experienced firsthand one of the most radical changes in the direction of the modern aviation world — the move from most jetliners having t hree and four engines t o j ust t wo. Greater airspeed might be the next defining moment, he believes, even before a hypersonic aircraft is created. More speed, however, means less fuel efficiency and corresponding cost. The challenge will be finding ways to neutralize or reverse that, especially when carbonneutral fuels, or so-called biofuels, are considered to address environmental concerns, Carskaden said. But there are plenty of incentives to get to places faster, he added.
“Because speed costs money, how fast do you want to go?” Carskaden asked hypothetically. “We will keep trying to seek out ways to connect the parts of the globe that today kind of test the limits of human endurance riding on an airplane. It’s amazing that we can actually connect those parts of the world in 16 or 18 hours, but it’s a long time to sit in a cabin.”
Taking a glimpse of the distant future, Carskaden next raised a possibility featured in the fictional TV series Star Trek — transporter devices that instantly move people from one place to another. “We could all be trumped by transporter technology in 100 years,” he said playfully.
Regardless of the technology that results, Carskaden remains convinced Boeing will play a big part, adding, “We could walk into something magical.”
Tom Grandine, an engineering specialist in geometric modeling and numerical analysis and a Senior Technical Fellow in Seattle, also takes a page from Star Trek when talking about the future. He and his team members create virtual simulations that can make airplane production prototypes unnecessary and, in turn, save significant cost. The downside is modeling can take months, even years, to complete.
Grandine also sees future modeling becoming more in tune with something featured in Star Trek, where new devices are created almost instantaneously using verbal commands to a computer.
He also envisions Boeing someday having the ability to link all of its hundreds of thousands of laptops and computers into one data stream, using an automated process turned on by something as simple as a screen saver and scanning for ideas and designs. They would be filtered for compatibility, connecting everyone across the enterprise like never before, he said.
Taking modeling one step further, Grandine said digital manufacturing might be a far more involved process in the future, both in customising the airplane build and possibly replacing all tooling. He envisions more concentrated 3-D printing on the assembly line.
“I suspect we’re still decades away from this, but imagine taking the design of an airplane to a factory-sized 3-D printer by which employees literally print the entire airplane in that spot, roll it out and fly it away,” he said.
Lasers will become smaller and be more powerful as the technology continues to evolve over the next couple of decades, according to Harold Schall, Boeing Laser & Electro-Optical Systems chief engineer and Senior Technical Fellow in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Schall was part of the Star Wars program, which began in the 1980s and later led to tests of a laser anti-ballistic missile system on a modified 747. In the future, he said, Boeing’s unmanned aerial systems might rekindle this type of defense effort — with a much smaller laser.
“You could put a laser on a Boeing unmanned vehicle and advances could be made where you will be able to get enough power in that laser to go back and do the Star Wars mission on that platform, only more efficiently and with smaller volume,” Schall said. “It could be a high-altitude vehicle that will stay up for days to protect the country.”
Emily Howard is a human factors engineer and Senior Technical Fellow based in Huntington Beach, California, who specialises in hu- man information processing. Her job is to help ensure that everything Boeing develops — products, tools and services — enables employees and customers to be effective, efficient and safe. “My work is not rocket science, but it is based on brain science, and the next century will see a tremendous change in how we understand, harness and amplify the power of the human brain,” she said.
Almost everything being built these days has a sensor, a display, a network, Howard noted. Technology of all kinds revolves around the increasing hunger for information and machines are becoming more involved in everyday decision-making, if only to manage the sheer volume of information available. Machines someday will augment human thinking as much as they have revolutionised human physical abilities, she said.
Howard sees a future that involves a much more immediate exchange of knowledge, such as thoughts and ideas from person to machine or even person to person, using technology as an enabler.
“We will be inserting information, injecting it directly into the human brain, and, in turn, translating human thought into complex commands,” Howard said. “Whether Boeing owns that technology or whether we just use it, we will be transferring information from a senior mechanic or engineer to a novice, training our users in a fraction of the time, and ultimately designing and operating aircraft simply by thought.”
Finally, 100 years from now, it won’t be all that surprising to view a Boeing factory floor, and perhaps other Boeing work environments, where artificial intelligence has a more substantial presence, according to Tillotson, the systems technology chief engineer for Boeing Research & Technology. He envisions robots performing a majority of the structural work in the future, able to do repetitive and strenuous tasks without interruption. Employees instead would guide and supervise the work in high-tech jobs that require human reasoning, troubleshooting and decision-making capabilities. Another benefit would be the elimination of work-related injuries.
Robots eventually will be more adept at processing information and coming up with ready answers than humans, turning engineering into a more automated process, he said.
“It will be a real interesting challenge for Boeing, as well as broader society,” said Tillotson, “to see what the role is for us when we have machines that are so very capable.”