News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Active turbulence cancellation makes bumpy flights 80% sm... by vlovich123 on Tuesday December 12, 2023 @12:05PM (#38614942)
Yeah unfortunately I don’t think such tech exists and at our current tech level I wouldn’t imagine it would work and could present real safety issues - you’d have fuel pipelines running throughout the airframe which is likely a significant amount of really serious fire risk, all of this adds a significant amount of weight and maintenance cost, I don’t believe such adjustment thrusters exist but I could be wrong, and I’m sure you would still get things wrong in your prediction which means your thrusters would add wear and tear on the airframe as well.

This article is about a PoC where they put sensors extended out of the airframe of a small slow moving aircraft and demonstrated a 60% prediction accuracy for a 10% fuel savings. It’s unlikely this approach would scale up to an airliner. The sensor problem might be but I have big questions about the adjustments an airliner moving at 600-900 mph can make to successfully counteract the prediction.

Re:Active turbulence cancellation makes bumpy flights 80% sm... by swells34 on Tuesday December 12, 2023 @12:12PM (#38615094)
Doppler radar systems can detect airflow vectors in arbitrarily large areas, so I imagine that we have the tech for that portion, but I too am concerned about trying to take something with that large a mass and surface area and counteract turbulent forces with it. That's also going to stress the airframe and avionics, cause maintenance schedule changes, etc...
Re:Active turbulence cancellation makes bumpy flights 80% sm... by lagrange77 on Tuesday December 12, 2023 @05:12PM (#38619400)
Yeah, i was joking. Those thrusters would have to be insanely powerful to accelerate such a big mass fast enough to counteract the rapidly changing forces, caused by turbulence.