Hyper-X - Flight into the Millennium

NASA The shape of the future: BWB model undergoing final research tests at NASA Langley Research Centre

The BWB is a concept that’s been around for over 70 years. This type of design used to be called ‘the flying wing’. Even 50 years ago engineers and designers knew that it could potentially carry huge numbers of passengers.or bombs. However, flying wings have no tail plane and early versions were highly unstable and almost impossible to control. They are constantly on the verge of stalling. Too unstable to be flown directly by hand, even the best pilots would struggle to keep them in the air. With 15 flaps and ailerons the BWB needs more than double the number of control surfaces of a normal aeroplane. Onboard computers are now able to interpret the pilot’s demands and translate them into safe and stable movements.

With its 17ft wingspan the Boeing/Stanford BWB model might look like the ultimate toy aircraft but this design could be the shape of the airliner of the future. So far this research programme has cost $4 million. On its maiden flight it was so successful that it demonstrated that this radical shape could outperform conventional designs by a huge margin.

NASA Concorde's successor: Engineers prepare a model HSCT for aerodynamic tests.

Super Speed

The greatest challenge of all is speed. Even the next generation of superliners such as the BWB will remain subsonic. If we really want to shrink the world we will have to travel at many times the speed of sound.

Concorde is the only existing supersonic passenger plane. It cruises at twice the speed of sound, around 1,400 mph. There are just 14 of them. Operated by Air France and British Airways they can cross the Atlantic in 3 hours 20 minutes. They carry only 100 passengers and they are very expensive to fuel and service. Designing a supersonic aircraft that will be significantly larger and faster than Concorde will not be easy. Concorde is over 20 years old. In that time, no one else has taken on the phenomenal task of designing a replacement. That is until now. NASA has recently started work on a new supersonic airliner. Known as the HSCT, short for High Speed Civilian Transport, it is twice as large as Concorde and will carry three times the number of passengers.