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This weird-looking plane could someday be a fast, clean option for air travel
The Celera 500L is a strange-looking aircraft that its creators hope will change the way some of us fly. Its fuselage resembles a sleek blimp, or maybe the noggins of the Coneheads of Saturday Night Live yore. Odd as it may appear, this experimental aircraft has completed 31 flights so far, all of them out of California. (www.popsci.com) Altro...
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i don't consider this beauty to be weird-looking, for it is the practical face of efficiency and fuel economy unmatched elsewhere. You want beautiful airplanes, then look at russian designed aircraft, but not their fuel economy. You want transportation costs reduced , this is what you will be pleased to get used to. Or something like it. Run the numbers and dump your preconceptions. Coming to an airport nearby someday soon...
P 180 Avanti, sans the canard, or Learfan 2100 crossbreed, who knows, but it is becoming harder and harder to reinvent the "wheel".
widely quoted as having stated that "the patent office would soon shrink in size, and eventually close, because… "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell*, 1899.
AB seems determined to keep em' goin' too.
widely quoted as having stated that "the patent office would soon shrink in size, and eventually close, because… "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell*, 1899.
AB seems determined to keep em' goin' too.
I hope the airplane or something similar makes it into production at even half the efficiency mentioned in this article. That would be a huge step forward. What I don't understand is its turbo-diesel power and not turbine.
It’s a prototype, things could change, the turbo-diesel might or might not be used in a production version....or, the designers get better fuel efficiency from the diesel than they could get using a turbine.
The diesel is a very interesting concept in itself. A V12 with twin 6 cylinder banks capable of independent operations for sudo multi engine reliability. I’m sure it’s more efficient but a PT6 twin-pack is well proven.
Given how that the first motorized flight being a canard style aircraft and that Burt Rutan capitalized on the concept with the various aircraft styles, including the LongEZ, the Velocity, and others, if this particular prototype had the same concept of putting the elevator in the front and the main wing toward the back not only make it nearly stall-proof but also faster and more fuel-efficient?
Just a thought.
Just a thought.
