Leaner, greener flying machines for the year 2025 are on the drawing boards of three industry teams under contract to the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate's Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) Project. Teams from The Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman have spent the last year developing technology that would allow future aircraft to burn 50 percent less fuel than aircraft that entered service in 1998 with 75 percent fewer harmful emissions, and to shrink the size of geographic areas affected by objectionable airport noise by 83 percent.
NASA awarded a little less than $11 million to the three teams to assess what kinds of aircraft designs and technologies could help meet the goals. The companies have just given NASA their results.
Boeing's advanced vehicle concept centers around the company's blended wing body design. The engines are on top of the plane's back end, flanked by two vertical tails to shield people on the ground from engine noise. Lockheed Martin proposed a box wing design, in which a front wing mounted on the lower belly of the plane is joined at the tips to an aft wing mounted on top of the plane. Northrop Grumman’s design is a flying wing with four high-bypass engines embedded in the upper surface of the aerodynamically efficient wing to provide noise shielding.
What the studies revealed is that NASA's goals to reduce fuel consumption, emissions, and noise are indeed challenging. The preliminary designs all met the pollution goal of eliminating landing and takeoff emissions of nitrogen oxides by 50 percent. All still have a little way to go to meet the other two challenges. All the designs were very close to a 50-percent fuel burn reduction, but noise reduction capabilities varied.
NASA's ERA project officials say they believe all the goals can be met if small gains in noise and fuel consumption reduction can be achieved in addition to those projected in the industry studies. The results shed light on the technology and design hurdles airline manufacturers face in trying to design lean, green flying machines, and will help guide NASA's environmentally responsible aviation investment strategy for the second half of its six-year project
