This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If you listen to the actual talk the bird they are talking about is an albatross and they are simply saying that to improve efficiency you need to make the wings longer and slimmer but then the plane will not fit in current aiport gates so they are working on folding wings.
Wait, so what has been inspiring wings up to this?
Bumble bees.
Bumble bees are actually inspiring wing designs now. For a long time our best theories on aerodynamics couldn't explain how Bumblebees could fly. Given the relative mass and wing size the bumble bee they couldn't explain how a bumble bee could fly.
In the last decade or so they figured it out after putting enough bumble bees into wind tunnels. Bumblebees generate additional lift by creating little vortexes in the air. So now wing designers are trying to incorporate that effect into their designs.
Do they flap?
Depends how bad the turbulence is.
Yes actually.
(They fold like a Navy carrier plane so they will fit at existing airport gates.)
Neat! But not quite the ornithopter I was hoping for.
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So, they are building a DeHavaland-Canada Dash-7 ?
Yes, frozen gas powered Dash-7!
Plot twist: And they'll still pack their passengers like sardines.
Aviation peaked with the Spruce Goose, AKA the Birch Bitch, AKA the H-4 Hercules. Been downhill ever since....
Never heard it called the birch bitch.
Airbus explained that it ran the numbers and found that, while it could build a successful hydrogen airliner, the plane would be successful in the same way that Concorde was successful. In other words, a technological triumph, but a commercial failure.
Just like any other hydrogen powered... Anything.
It's because hydrogen is a terrible fuel. In theory it could work, but there were so many practical problems with compressing the hydrogen into storage tanks and then keeping it in those storage tanks but the amount of effort you have to go through to make it work completely negates any performance benefits.
also most hydrogen now is not green at all, the production of it uses methane and releases CO2. only a small percent of hydrogen is truly green, and very expensive.
But its only exhaust is PuRe wATeR!! /s
It still makes me LOL to see people tout this, when battery EVs don’t exhaust anything.
Alas, battery EV passenger jets are a long way off.
It’s true, but so is retooling aviation around hydrogen. This is just a prediction but I think before that ever happens, EITHER we’ll have light batteries that are safer and more effective that Lithium OR we’ll have carbon-neutral ways to produce hydrocarbon fuels that can be used with conventional aircraft.
Hydrogen has struck out on personal electronics and ground transportation. Now it’s angling for aviation where its energy density may matter more. But it hasn’t been losing because of energy density.
....then there should be regulatory actions to help make them viable
Subsidising an inherently flawed technology isn't the way to go.
What are the other 0 carbon flight options? They are all flawed.
We can engineer our way through flaws with enough effort though.
Yes, but hydrogen has significantly more flaws than most other options. It's been around for 50 years, has never been a commercial success, and just inherently kinda sucks.
I guess this is why so many boeing airplanes have been falling out the sky nowadays. They forgot and accidentally based their aiplanes on land dwelling vetrebrates.
Lol.
Lead engineer: "oh did you say bird, okay I thought you said bear."
How many blades do you have to add to a turboprop before it's promoted to an open turbofan and touted as a major new innovation?
Based on my image search engineering, the answer to your question is 2.
Based on my one semester of air breathing propulsion that I took 25 years ago, I'm guessing there is more going on inside the turbine part of the engine that both allows sustainable fuels that current turbofans can't and also allows compression ratios at lower fan speeds that allows an open fan with fewer blades. Again, I barely passed air breathing propulsion back then and haven't used ANY of that knowledge since, so I'm mostly talking out of my ass.
So not the picture in the thumbnail but a generic jet
