Radically Shaped Plane is Completely Silent

"QUANTUM SHOT" #24

You won't hear this jet coming!
Airplane would carry 215 passengers and be as noisy as a washing machine.

In the breaking news today:

A team of U.S. and British researchers has unveiled the conceptual design for a near-silent, environmentally friendly passenger plane. The SAX-40, which has been developed by the Cambridge-MIT Institute, is a radically different shape of aircraft.

"For passengers we think it will be like flying in a cinema or theater seat."
The design employs a "blended wing" and a tailless fuselage with engines mounted on top in a similar style to the current Stealth spy-planes - a radically different form of commercial aircraft to the fleets that are currently in the air.

HOW IT WORKS:
Source: BBC

1. Airframe
2. Engines
3. Exhausts
4. Undercarriage
5. Trailing edge
6. Leading edge

- the airframe is as smooth as possible.
- no flaps on the wings, which are a major source of airframe noise on conventional aircraft.
- the design does not need a tail, which cuts down on turbulent airflow and noise from the back of the plane.
- engines are embedded into the body of the aircraft.
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"Flying Wing" Shape

Ever since the Boeing 707 first flew in 1957 and ushered in the commercial jet age, airliners have changed very little in their basic appearance. But the case for the radical change in shape was getting stronger...

The proposed plane has a 68-metre wingspan and is 44 metres long, comparable in size to a Boeing 767. "You take the fuselage and you squish it, and you spread it out, and it's an all-lifting body," said Zoltan Spakovsky, an associate aeronautics professor at MIT who was a chief engineer on the project.

Which brings us to the concepts of the "FLYING WING", which were popular since the Thirties: