THE FUTURE OF FLIGHT

IN THE GREEK MYTH that so fascinated many of the earliest pioneers of flight, Daedalus’ son Icarus died after flying too close to the sun, which melted the wax on his feathered wings. In 2001, ironically inverting the mythical experience, a NASA Helios ultralight flying wing powered by the sun’s rays flew to the outer edge of the earth’s atmosphere.

Surely one of the most extraordinary aircraft yet built, Helios is “piloted” by a controller on the ground and travels at a sedate 32kph (20mph). Its wing, measuring 75.25m (247ft) and thus longer than that of a Boeing 747, is covered in solar panels that generate the electricity to drive its 14 motors. Storing electricity in fuel cells during the day allows it to continue to operate through the night. Totally ecologically friendly, Helios is destined for sustained flight at the edge of space. On 13 August 2001 it set an altitude record for a propeller-driven aircraft, rising to 29,511m (96,863ft). The earth’s atmosphere at that altitude is similar to the atmosphere of Mars, so the flight allowed NASA scientists to learn about the feasibility of a flying machine that might cruise the skies of the “red planet”. Helios could also serve many of the functions of a satellite – in communications or weather observation, for example – at a fraction of the cost. With no need to refuel, NASA believes Helios will eventually be able to fly for months at a time – in effect until its parts wear out.

Distance travelled

Helios is a superb example of the constant power of aviation to amaze with unexpected feats of technological innovation, revealed time and again through the 20th century. Looking back at the distance flight advanced in its first 100 years offers a vertiginous perspective. Any measure of aircraft performance reveals dizzying progress – speed, for example, accelerating from Glenn Curtiss’ record-breaking 75kph (47mph) in 1909 to top speeds passing 640kph (400mph) in the 1930s; the breaking of the the sound barrier by the end of the 1940s; and aircraft reaching Mach 2 and Mach 3 in the 1960s, topping out with the X-15 at Mach 6.7 in 1967. C-5 transport introduced at the end of the 1960s could carry about 100 times the payload of a World War I bomber, and has itself been far surpassed by transports such as the extraordinary Airbus Beluga series, capable of carrying cargoes well in excess of 50 tonnes.

The history of flight’s impact on the world shows a similar acceleration. If you were writing a general account of life in the 20th century, aircraft would only figure marginally for the first three decades. Some reputable single-volume histories of World War I barely mention aviation at all. Until the late 1930s, aircraft were a craze that generated heroes, but really had little effect on the lives of any but a small minority of people.

It was World War II that truly brought aircraft centre stage, transforming the practice of warfare. Commercial aviation took until the jet age to begin to effect a dramatic change in leisure and business. Even in the United States, in the early 1960s half the population had still never flown.

But by the 1990s over a billion passengers were flying worldwide every year. It was an open question at the start of the third millennium whether flight still had revolutionary possibilities, or whether it hadbecome, like tanks in warfare or railways in passenger transport, an established feature of the landscape that would endure (with improvements) but undergo no further dramatic expansion or transformation.

BIGGER JUMBO

The giant Airbus A380 should be carrying its payload of 550 passengers in airline service by 2006. The A380’s unprecedented wingspan and weight will require airports to upgrade their facilities, as they had to when the Boeing 747 was first introduced in the 1970s.

The latest American fighter ready to go into service in the first decade of the new millennium, the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, was an advance over its predeccesors in its stealth features and its ability to cruise at supersonic speed – all previous fighters could only “go supersonic” in short bursts because of fuel consumption. But it was not a dramatic revision of the fighter concept. Vectored thrust was one of the most radical areas being explored in experiments with fighters, Passenger travel Before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (see page 410), the aircraft industry was predicting that four billion passengers a year would be carried by 2020 – almost triple the current level of air travel. Boeing confidently stated that the world’s commercial air fleet would increase from 14,500 to 33,000 airliners in the first 20 years of the new millennium. The implications of this for airports and airways was, in its way, daunting. After 11 September the shocking fall in passenger numbers made a permanent end to growth in air traffic seem not out of the question. Perhaps the best that can be said is that the future is unpredictable.

The airline and aircraft-manufacturing businesses have always been financially precarious, subject to downward pressure on prices and upward pressure on costs. And so it will remain. The two options open to the airline business, if it were to change, were bigger airliners or faster airliners. The only two manufacturers left in the civil-aviation big league, Boeing and Airbus, seemed to have opted for opposite strategies.

Airbus A380 looked ready to head the field in the size stakes, promising to carry 550 passengers and be in service by 2006. Boeing instead were pushing development of the Sonic Cruiser, intended to carry 200 to 250 passengers at almost the speed of sound – upwards of 0.95 Mach – over a distance of 9,500 to 14,500km (6,000 to 9,000 miles).

The supersonic option seemed to have taken refuge in the private aviation sector, with ideas being floated for a supersonic private jet, the ultimate personal and corporate status symbol.

Military aircraft

Military aviation was in a sense in the ascendant in the early 2000s, the key to power projection in a still-hazardous world, with citizens in technologically advanced democracies accustomed to peace and reluctant to countenance the level of casualties ground war usually involves. Drones were an increasingly popular and effective option, both for battlefield reconnaissance and carrying out air-strikes, completely obviating the risk of human losses. But cost-conscious politicians were increasingly inclined to query the need for ever more expensive aircraft, which could easily seem like toys for the boys to play with. In the United States, the technological lead over any currently conceivable enemies might prove a deterrent to investment in expensive high-tech military SHRINKING WORLD allowing previously impossible manoeuvres, but again it could hardly be seen as a revolutionary innovation.

The Raptor’s extreme cost was controversial, although it was argued that it was justified by the need to keep up with Russian technology. It was increasingly difficult to see why a war with Russia would be fought, but it could plausibly be argued that the Russians might sell their most advanced aircraft to a country that America might feel called upon to fight. The Russian Sukhoi S-37 Berkut, with its forward-swept wing, was, on the face of it, a more radical design break than any experimental Western fighter, but it was unclear whether the Russians had the money or the will to press on at the cutting edge. Western governments certainly showed signs of tightening the purse strings. The cheaper Joint Strike Fighter, planned to be mass-produced as NATO’s future standard fighter aircraft, was a deliberate compromise between cost and technology.

Open frontiers

Space exploration remained the open frontier where, at least in theory, boundless possibilities existed for new achievement. Although the ideal of an aircraft that would take off under its own power and fly into space has still to be realized, the shuttle and space stations have already begun to make space flight a once-in-a-lifetime vacation experience available to the ultra rich. Enthusiasts such as former astronaut Buzz Aldrin are seriously talking about journeys to Mars in the 2020s. Projects for moon colonies and Mars colonies still have plausibility, and serious scientists speculate about a future in which humans or their self-replicating computers spread through the galaxies. At the start of the third millennium it was hard to see space travel affecting most people’s lives except in science fiction scenarios, yet the apparently fantastic has become real before.

WHITE WHALE

The extraordinary Airbus Beluga is the world’s largest transport aircraft by volume. It is basically the bottom half of an A300 wide body airliner with a bulbous cargo hold mounted on top. The Beluga was designed to carry sections of Airbus airliners between factories in different countries

FEAR OF FLYING

Statistics prove that flying is by far the safest way of travelling long distances, the airline industry has always known that its success depends on convincing the public that air travel is safe. This has never been an easy task. The drama of major air disasters impresses itself so intensely on the public consciousness – partly, no doubt, precisely because they are rare – that flying is often inextricably associated in people’s minds with sudden and violent death. Yet measures to reduce the number of air accidents and aviation-related deaths may undermine the image of air travel as a normal, safe, everyday experience. The more safety procedures air passengers are subjected to, the less secure they are likely to feel. Surely flying cannot be that safe if we are searched before boarding and flight attendants insist on telling us where the oxygen masks and emergency exits are? For the nervous, there is nothing quite so disquieting as constant reassurance “for your comfort and safety”.

Yet the figures are unequivocal. Although accident statistics fluctuate from year to year, flying on a commercial airliner always emerges as by far the safest way of travelling long distances. In 1996, for example, a relatively bad year for aviation deaths, a total of 1,187 people were killed on commercial jet flights worldwide. This compares with over 40,000 people killed that year in road accidents in the United States alone, and worldwide probably a quarter of a million roadaccident deaths. Flying is far from being equally safe in different parts of the world: in a typical year, the United States might have one flight fatality for every two million passenger-hours flown, while Africa might have 13 fatalities per million flight hours. But even in Africa you are more likely to be killed or injured driving to and from the airport than on board the aeroplane. The risk of a fatal accident each time you board an airliner has been calculated at roughly three in a million. This means that if an otherwise immortal individual made a flight every day, he or she could expect, on average, to survive for over 900 years before dying in an air accident. (Flying in a private aircraft carries a quite different risk – it is almost 50 times more dangerous than flying in a commercial jet.)

Progress on safety has been the necessary condition for the development of mass air travel. In the early 1930s, there was a fatality for every 4.8 million passenger-miles flown in the United States. In a single, admittedly exceptional, period in the winter of 1936–37, there were five fatal air crashes in the US in 28 days. Translated into the contemporary world of widebody jets, a 1930s style accident rate would have produced a totally unacceptable mass of fatalities. By the 1980s, American airlines flying major routes had reduced the death rate to around one for every 300 million passenger-miles. Even so, recent decades set all the records for air disasters, because of the large numbers of passengers on a single flight.

The worst year for air-accident fatalities worldwide was 1985, with 2,129 people killed – although 1,105 of the victims died in just three incidents. In 2000, a fairly average year for aviation in recent times, there were 1,126 deaths worldwide. To put this figure in perspective, there were by then some 1.5 billion passenger flights being made worldwide every year, over 600 million of them in the United States. The safety of commercial flying is a triumph of organization and regulation, and a tribute to the professionalism of all involved in the aviation business, from those who make the airframes, engines, and avionics, through the ground maintenance staff and flight crews to administrators and air-traffic controllers. The volume of traffic that air-traffic control has to cope with has, of course, increased dramatically in the jet age. By the late 1990s there were some 7,000 flights a day into and out of New York.

To look at it another way, controllers at Chicago’s O’Hare airport were responsible for the safety of around 70 million passengers a year. But despite occasional panics about overstretched air-traffic controllers being overwhelmed by numbers, the system has continued to cope well. So has the system of periodic checks and overhauls designed to ensure that aircraft are fit to fly, with faultless engines and free of structural weaknesses.

Considering what amazingly complex machines modern aircraft are – a Boeing 747 has about 4.5 million moving parts – it is astonishing how rarely they suffer serious faults. A modern jet may have ten hours ground maintenance for every hour it spends in the air.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 921