The name Lockheed has not been heard in relation to commercial passenger aircraft for some time. Their last passenger aircraft, the L1011 TriStar, ended production in 1984 and the company, now called Lockheed Martin, has since focused on the military (although it does provide many civil transport systems and components). It was interesting, therefore to see that they were one of the teams to be tasked with developing NASA’s vision of the future of commercial aviation, along with our friends at Boeing and Northrop Grumman (another mainly military supplier). The design above is their proposal for an aircraft that meets NASA’s goals for “less noise, cleaner exhaust and lower fuel consumption. Each aircraft has to be able to do all of those things at the same time, which requires a complex dance of tradeoffs between all of the new advanced technologies that will be on these vehicles”.
The designs they have brainstormed are interesting and for the most part fairly realistic, such as this blended wing concept from the Boeing team. Although it seems like a very long time away, 2025 is just around the corner in aircraft design terms and with less than 15 years to go, these teams better get busy. Not only is a large passenger aircraft a very complex vehicle to design, but the prototype development, production process and sales and marketing challenge mean that these aircraft could be flying before we know it.
Not to be forgotten of course is the Airbus future concept plane, launched at Farnborough Air Show 2010. Although this is never expected to be built in quite this form, the above concepts bring together many ideas for new engines and aerodynamic designs that are currently on the cards.
Early last year, NASA also ran a design competition for the generation after this one, due to enter service in around 2035. Here, we start seeing some fairly radical changes in design as the aeronautics industry start looking to the tough target we have set for ourselves of reducing emissions from all aviation to half of what they were in 2005.
