> JetZero, co-founded in 2020 by start-up veteran Tom O’Leary and aerospace legend Mark Page, is developing the world’s first commercial all-wing airplane. With up to 50% better fuel efficiency and lower carbon emissions compared to existing commercial airliners, JetZero's Z4 will offer the aviation industry a clear path to achieving its 2050 net-zero goals while also elevating the passenger experience. Working alongside the US Air Force, NASA, and the FAA, and backed by decades of investment and research into blended wing technology. JetZero looks to enter commercial service in the early 2030s.

Where an "all-wing" airplane is, kudos to Gemini,

> one that merges the main body and wings into a single lifting surface. This can reduce drag, lower fuel burn, and expand interior space.

just ditch the plane. That will be so much money you can invest in net-positive technologies.

Also I believe the further away you are from the rotation axis of the plane where it turns left or right, the more unpleasant your flight may be

And another company working in the same space, Natilus, is planning to fit 150-250 passengers on theirs, somewhat comparable capacity-wise to a 757, but about 30% smaller length/width.

They appear to make more sense for large passenger jets because the interior volume scales better. There’s a ton of practical concerns though.

They won’t fit into existing airport setups. Seats near the wing will move waaay more than near the center during banking turns (maybe they’ll be cheaper lol)

I don’t think it’s a given they’ll replace what we’ve got, but who knows.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_wing_body)

(And actually, now I've just noticed they do use the term further down in the body of the text).

You’re telling me that just recently a random startup thought they’d work on it? It’s not exactly startup territory…

For an all-wing design to work the onboard flight control system needs to make thousands of microscopic surface adjustments every second to keep the flight stable. This is much more practical with today's computing power and technology, even if the concept may have been thought of long ago.

Mentour Now! has a great video discussing the aerodynamics of the B-2 which has a lot of relevancy to the JetZero design. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLtzjP1_3nQ

No windows

Evacuation issues

Won't work in some airports

Nausea inducing

... It's not without issues.

But freighters generally have lower utilization on less price-sensitive routes, so operators tend not to care so much about fuel economy (and for related reasons, usually aren't new aircraft). So however much easier the route to certification might be, it's a horrible market...

This sounds fixable in avionics and training. (Shallow, gradual banks.)

This is not really helpful for passenger comfort. For a turn to be comfortable, you want the turn to be such that the effective force the passengers feel has no sideways (relative to the passengers) component, and the required roll angle is only a function of the velocity and turning radius. The aircraft design is irrelevant.

The Wikipedia article is mediocre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_flight

My response is (a) this can be controlled in avionics and training, i.e. don’t do that, and (b) now that I think about it, vertical Gs aren’t as sickening as lateral ones.

Specify a maximum roll rate in training and normal-law software and this problem is solved

I’m wondering whether there are major airfields with traffic patterns that require roll rates that would exceed whatever maximum is desired for comfort. My intuition is that the situation would be tolerable at most airfields but that normal-law limits that are too restrictive could be dangerous.

One, this is where the more lifting body turning faster with less roll kicks in. Two, I suspect those airfields would also be the last ones to add terminals that can dock with a non-standard plane.

Can you explain what you mean? If an aircraft follows a given trajectory (center of mass position as a function of time x(t) where x is a 3D position), then it has an acceleration a(t) that is just the second derivative of x(t) and has nothing to do with the shape of the airframe.

Now account for gravity and kinematics: the force per unit mass that must be applied to the airframe is F/m = a + g • ẑ (ẑ is the upward unit vector).

The exact same result applies to a person inside the aircraft. If you want comfortable flight you need F/m to have no sideways component from the perspective of the passenger (and in the absence of gimballed seats the passenger is facing the same way as the airframe).

So far none of this has anything to do with the shape of the lifting body. And I’m wondering why you think more lifting body makes much difference. There are only two real flight parameters knobs you can turn to achieve this condition. You can roll, and you can sideslip. And, unless my intuition about the geometry is quite wrong, you would need a very extreme sideslip angle (pointing the nose quite close to the center of curvature) to have much effect on the required roll angle. So the roll angle needed is mostly a function of the angle of the acceleration vector plus gravity relative to the velocity and not much of a function of how the airframe is able to generate lift.

For another way to think of it, imagine a fancy rocket performing the exact same maneuver with no lift or drag whatsoever. Either the rocket could point itself toward the center of curvature (adjusted for gravity as above) and use its main engines to generate the required acceleration (extreme sideslip), or it could point roughly the same direction as its velocity vector and use a sideways-firing rocket to generate the required acceleration. If the latter, then, for passenger comfort, the roll angle needs to be such that the sideways rocket is in the front/back/up/down plane with respect to the passengers, which determines the required roll angle.

And I don’t see how any of this has anything to do with the same of a lifting body or the actual capabilities of the maneuvering thrusters of a hypothetical rocket. On a given flight path, you have a constrained set of valid roll, pitch, and yaw angles.

A few years ago, I would your use of diaeresis an admirable quirk. But now, especially given the em-dashes, I'm wondering if you're an LLM overtrained on the New Yorker.

(Myself, I've been doing em-dashes since about 2012, I think I found out by accident that you got them on MacOS from option-shift-minus after finding out by accident you could get en-dash from option-minus)

An airliner entering a 30 degree roll over 3 seconds would have passengers pop up or down 25 feet, with at least +0.3 and -0.3G of acceleration. It would come with a "going over the top of the roller coaster" feeling. This is in addition to the roll / rotation.

Yaw is interesting for similar reasons.

Picking out my house, seeing tiny cars on a remote highway, etc. Even 100+ MP cameras and high resolution screens won't come close to that level of detail.

Where that number comes from: they claim 50% reduction in fuel consumption, which sounds doubtful to me, and fuel is about a third of flight costs, and I’m making some generous assumptions around perfect competition.

Thing is with current structure airlines would dilute business class too much and airplane manufacturers would increase density all while decreasing fuel use per passenger - none of which is desirable.

And that's before we talk about night flights when there's nothing to see, flights over water when there's nothing to see and so on.

So yes, I'm sure some people like windows. But the majority have demonstrated that they're just fine flying without them.

I also was on a flight once that had a very bouncy landing with all the windows down - when I didn't realize we were anywhere near the ground yet. I'm not into tuning out reality to that degree, and don't really feel obligated to help anyone else do so either ;)

I was sitting next to a passenger once who was asked by the steward to raise the window shade.

While doing it, they asked "why". Answering for the steward I said "it's so Fire and Rescue can see into the plane if we crash". (Which is true, I used to work at airport fire and rescue.)

The steward looked at me with a "that's not helpful" look. My bad :( .

Although I think it's still useful for people to understand things are done for their safety. Not that we expect to crash, and most don't, but every little thing that might improve survival is done. That encourages rather than discourages me.

But obviously you can open it to look, and there's only a small number that would apply to.

So it's a factor, but the primary reason is being able to look in.

And I was rather miffed about missing out on the view outside, because as a technical guy, I totally enjoy seeing all the activity at an airport! Half the fun of flying!

Takeoffs and landings are the biggest risk times (and also the best proximity to Fire and Rescue). In hot environments reducing heatload in the plane can definitely improve comfort. Bummer about missing the action though...

I get that they don't want people to panic, but I think an attitude of coddling people like that isn't productive.

>> [IATA] recommends keeping the window shades open for takeoff and landing as best practice [...] The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also does not mandate it. Instead, U.S. airlines are free to set their own policies, and most stop short of making it a requirement.

In practice, that means airlines like Delta, American, Alaska, and Southwest typically leave it up to passengers, although flight attendants may still encourage open shades. United Airlines, which was briefly the only U.S. carrier that asked passengers to raise their shades in 2022 (an order it quickly rescinded in order to align with other carriers and provide more clarity for travelers), now also frames it as a recommendation rather than a rule.

[0] https://www.afar.com/magazine/why-do-window-shades-have-to-b...

[1] https://thepointsguy.com/news/united-window-shades/

My response to anyone using that kind of language is "go fuck yourself, you pompous shit," but let me explain more clearly: Me keeping my window open is no more problematic than other people trying to force someone to sit in the dark at noon.

What's odious about your comment is that it presumes one is a "problem" if they don't do what everyone around them is doing. Really, the world doesn't need more conformists, but what we really don't need are more people scolding anyone who has a mind of their own. Somehow your comment manages to distill the union of social bullying and cowardice in the fewest possible words. It's interesting. Your language is that of a psychotic conformist, legible to those who don't have that disease.

Interior isle seats cost as much as window seats in airlines that charge for position. People just want space.

Ah... A dream

Just hope they don’t make an “ad-free” window a premium upgrade…

Our generation thinks we're so much "smarter", but we're living on an ecological credit card that our children will have to pay, not to mention many of the planet's ecosystems, just so we can all have "memories of actually being in Venice" rather than simply a picture of us in Venice, which in the end is the artifact we have. (If we are that insistent on "being everywhere" and checking off a bucket list, perhaps "Total Recall" was onto something LMAO.)

Edit: apparently 12.5% of the population has claustrophobia. If 5% of flyers choose a different airline due to simulated windows that would wipe out any cost benefit from fuel savings.

Suffice it to say, from stable aeronautics at-edge, jet way footprint efficiency, ground support efficiency, airframe pressurization, cargo & passenger logistics, lifespan, and certification, there are many, many reasons “tube + wings” is the dominant airframe architecture for all non-military aircraft.

Novel things always look unviable. First cars, first planes, first EVs all looked like dubious gimmicks sorely lacking the required infrastructure.

So far, I see zero evidence that this company has addressed any of the aforementioned challenges beyond theoretical fuel consumption and theoretical passenger logistics.

As someone who has 31 hours towards their single-engine ppl cert, I absolutely abhor the stagnation of general and commercial aviation due, largely, to certification barriers, BUT even having a viable flight-worthy blended-wing concept does not make for a viable mass market product.

Not related, see the near half-century of "alternative" wing and airframe designs that are absolutely better at a few pieces of the puzzle, but also absolutely failed to be viable when integrated into a fully functional and safe airplane.

This company needs to focus on success in a niche product role before addressing the safety, integration, and manufacturing needs of the mass commercial aviation market. They are not (atm) backed by this sort of "patient capital".

Not related, see all of the VC and failures required by Whittle (in wartime no less) to develop the jet engine or Tesla's corporate journey from Roadster -> S -> Y.

FFS, have some self-awareness! This is the Dunning-Kruger Effect in practice.

If anything, it's taught me how little I know about "real flying" compared to CFD and systems engineering.

Commercial aviation is conservative because aviation is "hard" and mistakes in aviation are "extremely costly".

Or the difference between a (noob) software user and a software engineer.

We wouldn't take airliner design advice today from the Wright brothers, either.

They are not saying "hold my beer while I put the industry to rights!"

traditional looking commercial jets, their designs, their manufacturing processes, their innovations (yes boeing/airbus do innovate and have for a long time even though it doesnt seem that way) have all been shaped heavily by human blood. to some degree a radical new design almost guarantees more deaths at a commercial level there's really no shortcutting this without it.

dont get me wrong im super open to the possibility that something like this is possible itd be better for the whole world, but there's no way we get there without re-experiencing some hard lessons if we want to push it pash some sort of proverbial finish line

This assumes the lessons were specific to the body type and aren’t generalizable?

Pressurizing a tube vs pressurizing a pancake (or flattened sphere, or some other easy approximation) will have very different mechanical loading characteristics. Turbulence (differences in air speed/pressure) across a large flat-ish surface that also has a signifiant pressure differential will also prove challenging to design for and scale up.

Aerospace is a very high dimensional design process. Doing anything different puts you into unknown territory real fast.

Look at this world we live in. Billionaires are living it up and climate change is wrecking winter and here we are in the mud, someone like you can't even afford a simple shift key.

It's all so crushing.

It's always exciting to see futuristic designs and bleeding edge tech but there are a lot of footnotes in aviation history filled with these.

I think electric aviation (in general aviation) is probably the best/real frontier to watch for innovation currently. Many advances in aviation come from much smaller operations doing something successfully.

All of the constraints you mentioned are the results of decades of optimization around the tube-shape aircraft design. Meaning the design has to be proven first. Infrastructure will adapt.

Also, I suspect the first application will be military, such as Next Generation Air-refueling System (NGAS):

https://www.twz.com/air-force-says-it-needs-more-survivable-...

The HondaJet HQ is here (and has been for some time), as well as a number of aircraft repair facilities inside the airport fence, and there are ~5mil people within a 90 minute drive of GSO, so it's becoming easier to source talent for aerospace as well.

Our long runways and the fact that we only have around ~7 flights arriving/departing per hour, and the proximity to Washington DC, is why GSO is used quite often for training operations for "Air Force One" - we see 28000 and 29000 do very low passes over our house around once a month as they do touch-and-go and go-around drills, so it's always funny to see the flurry of "did you guys see that?" posts on Nextdoor.

Why does it need bold new design and innovation? More people (can afford to) fly every year, more safely, and with broadly more consistency than they ever have. The success of the commercial aviation industry as a whole is breathtaking.

To your argument of (paraphrase here) 'it is good enough why innovate'. I flat out reject that argument. Horse and buggy were good enough. The telegraph was good enough. We only needed 1 mb of memory because it was good enough. We are missing so much right now. We potentially could have small, efficient, point to point air taxi service for the average person, completely dismantling the massive, and horrible to deal with for people, hub and spoke system. Travel could get so much better and cheaper, but instead we have the 737 max. An incremental change on a decades old design because real innovation is lacking in the industry.

That's not my argument, you are putting words in my mouth. My argument is "you better have a good reason to argue the commercial air industry is stagnant because the industry's incremental progress over time has been incredible." Look at this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft

That's crazy!

The issue with your 737 MAX story is the trade-offs they made - oversized engine without massive recertification or requiring airport retrofits - worked. It is an absurdly successful product despite the early engineering failures. It is the best selling Boeing aircraft of all time and the second best selling commercial airline of all time (to the a320).

Innovation for the sake of innovation isn't worth anything, the current commercial airline stack is deeply optimized and delivers low cost, safe travel to hundreds of millions of people globally. What, exactly, would you like to see innovation on? What trade-offs are you willing to make?

I spent a few years in the commercial airline industry. They have a ton of problems, very few of them would be solved with a revolutionary plane design.

Very exciting promises and design here!

I also feel like a lot of modern air travel is designed around making something that's highly unnatural and inherently terrifying into something palatable for most people. I'm not talking about actual safety, but the perception of safety. Which isn't exactly a logic thing. More about keeping that lizard brain from freaking out too hard.

Edit: also this older concept image shows windows: https://www.jetzero.aero/hs-fs/hubfs/JetZero-Z4-left.png?wid...

From a regulatory perspective, the layers of bureaucracy needed to get approval to build a bridge has nothing on starting up an airline manufacturing company. Once you have a company with a history of approval, you can practically do what you want, but getting to that point is nearly impossible.

Scaled Composites? Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time…

Presumably we haven't heard as much after Northrop bought them?

I think it's awesome that Scaled Composites is involved... they really have such specialized knowledge of all kinds of aeronautical engineering.

Even then, good luck recovering when you, even marginally, exceed the energy*altitude parameters during take-off/landing during high wind shear.

Even B2s, with all of their on-board systems, have highly restrictive TOGA envelopes.

Btw, it will take hydrogen propulsion for their planes to be zero CO2 emission.

Then you'll understand why so many Cessna 172s were built.

This is, primarily, why you only see delta wings used in super-sonic aircraft where these limitations are more than made-up for its ability to go trans-sonic with (relative) thrust efficiency.

I know that the crew uses the typical seating time to refuel and load luggage in the underbelly, but one can dream of not having to wait to get off the airplane.

Then there are the Imperial slaves which are considered cargo and not passengers, but it's a different story...

There's Airbus's US patent US9193460B2 if you fancy a comedy read!

Bad news: this generally wasn't counted before and when counted roughly doubles the impact so in some senses you're back to where you started.

But it's a much lower hanging fruit than anything else and as yet we're not doing it.

In the UK there is air passenger duty which is for example £102 per passenger on economy seats to the US. I think they are reluctant to raise it too much incase business shifts elsewhere.

I'm seeing it from both sides of the isles that people are being fed up with the overlords.

But currently the zillionaire tantrums control the future so you're right.

Zoom beats Boom.

Since the global South will suffer the most from climate change, they might disagree with developed nations ‘subsiding’ flights.

I live on an island, and it's literally only now, in my late forties that I'm earning the kind of money that allows me to travel moderately. If you tire of the privilege, feel free not to. For me it's perhaps the one aspect of modernity that unarguably better than the past, the thing we get in return for global homogeneity.

You think people resent the rich now? Imagine how resentment would grow under an enforced localism. Imagine how much bigotry would increase.

Cosmopolitanism is real! People who travel are more tolerant, less supportive of war, and better informed. The world isn't a virtuality to them, it's a set of places they have visited or may visit. Peoples they've known or may yet know.

Did Berlin to Nessau through small routes: wonderful. Berlin to Prague? Stellar, if long. Berlin to Munich? Amazing all 4-5 times, unless they forget to stock up on soft pretzels.

The addicts cannot? Or who cannot? Anyone with money cannot?

Homo fricking economicus for you alright.

As a simple matter, it keeps my city clean - we all put garbage in the bins (yes there's a law, but no way could it be enforced if the great majority of people didn't do it already). More dramatically and recently, the protests in India.

> society

Society is us - you, me, everyone. Nobody else is coming to help us.

I'm responsible for what I do, for the consequences of my actions. It's embarassing to say it's someone else's job (especially when the someone else is 'society'), and therefore I'm not going to do anything.

That term lacks all credibility - it's just a weak attack based on mind-reading - and is a signal itself.

Most people actually want do good - humans naturally are very social and want to do well for the group - and without prioritizing signaling. How sad that some are so politically driven by reactionary politics that their contribution is to snipe at others.

I disagree. There's coherent economic theory about how costly actions can be used to provide credible signals. It's been used in a wide variety of disciplines including biology (peacock's tails). No mind-reading is needed. I understand that sometimes it is used by right-wingers to attack left-wing positions. My comment wasn't driven by reactionary politics, and my point was to encourage people to think about what actually does well for the group - which, at the risk of repeating myself, is about minimizing the cost for a given level of benefit.

To describe something in the real world, you need objective evidence, in this case of someone's motive - or there's always mind-reading.

It looks like they've taken this mostly from an older Boeing BWB design for future air-to-air refueling aircraft (although the wing shape is a bit different).

Avoids the issues about people sitting in the wing area and "enjoying" the roller coaster effect when the plane rolls or yaws?

Just because some people go to work in inefficient and dangerous-to-others cars does not make them more efficient. I am working a construction job, does this mean I should not think about what I am doing ?

yes, they would loose so much that few lives arent as valuable..

Three things on the JetZero website trip my BS detector. First, it appears they’re developing their own avionics displays/interface? That’s a terrible idea, they need to be laser focused on one core task.

Second is this quote: “The Pathfinder team has built and flown five generations of scaled aircraft over 30 flights. The most recent flights validate both the configuration and control laws of our full-size Jet1 Demonstrator.“

Over 30 flights seems really low. They should be testing way more than that, no?

Third, I spy a full-scale interior mock-up. There isn’t even a working prototype, but they’re paying people to pick out carpet colors?

I really want this to succeed, but it doesn’t look like these are serious people.

https://www.jetzero.aero/progress

Why so few? I'd expect them to be flying daily or as often as possible, to gather as much data as possible. The next step is a full-scale demonstrator. No doubt they have their reasons, but I wonder what they are?

Examples abound: the Hyperloop being the most pertinent. Everybody jumps in on the perceived gold rush of a truly stupid idea that's only real purpose is to generate mountains of money.

Anything done solely for money is guaranteed to be s#!t.