It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s both!

New research suggests that a bird-shaped airplane — with angled wings and a fatter body — would make the modern plane more fuel efficient.

Geoffrey Spedding, an engineer at the University of Southern California, spoke about this discovery — and how it could change the way we fly.


How did you discover that a bird-shaped design would make planes more efficient?
To start at the beginning, Joachim Huyssen [of North-West University] in South Africa was wondering about efficient aerodynamic designs and whether the current dominant configuration is the best available.

There are several features of that design that are aerodynamically not convenient and not optimal. The best possible [design] from an aerodynamic point of view is a wing by itself.

You would think then the best possible airplane would be a flying wing, and, in fact, flying wings have been made but the difficulty is two-fold:

• You have to make the wing so big to pack people and cargo in that you end up wasting a lot of space. The waste of space causes aerodynamic drag, the airplane is more heavy than it should be. Your optimal design turns out to be not optimal after all.
• All existing airplanes have this tail plane in back. The purpose of the tail plane is to provide pitch stability. The nose goes up or the nose goes down — you control that with the tail plane. This comparatively little tail plane sits at the end of a long body on the conventional plane. The purpose of the long body is to carry the tail plane and put it a long way [from the plane's center of gravity], so it has a large effect. But that’s a really inefficient way to do business. All the time you’re dragging this tail plane through the air, its only purpose is to make sure you don’t pitch up or down. It doesn’t otherwise do any good and it forces you to have a long, cigar-shaped body, which is not the best shape a body can be.

Article Continued here It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s both! - SmartPlanet