Aircraft, airlines, history, and the future of flight.
Picture the wing of a Boeing 787 in cruise. It’s flexing — visibly, beautifully — bending upward several metres at the tips as it carries hundreds of tonnes of aircraft and fuel through air that is never perfectly smooth. That flex is a feature, not a flaw. The wing is alive in a mechanical sense,…
Crouch down beside a Boeing 737 at a busy gate and you’ll notice something that looks almost wrong. The engines don’t hang beneath the wing the way they do on every other narrowbody in the world — they sit in front of it, with the nacelles squashed into a distinctly non-circular shape at the bottom.…
Here is the number that haunts every engineer who has ever dreamed of a genuinely electric airliner: roughly 35 times. That is approximately how much more energy a kilogram of jet fuel contains compared to a kilogram of the best lithium-ion battery cells flying today. You cannot simply swap a fuel tank for a battery…