NASA's aircraft of the future (photos)

Although noise reduction is a big issue for communities, which are close by airports, I think many of us are forgeting the noise experienced by the passengers on board.
There are some pretty obvious safety issues (design deficiencies) with the AMELIA (Advanced Model for Extreme Lift and Improved Aeroacoustics). First of all, if you remember some recent catastrophic engine cover failures in select Rolls Royce engines on Airbus 380 jets, the covers failed to stop engine parts from being ejected as schrapnel. Since the engines are located below the fuselage, any ejected material is less likely to make its way into the passenger compartment. A far greater threat to the jet in this design is a catastrophic engine failure and/or engine mount (pylon) failure. If the engines are located below the wings, they will fall earthward. No big deal, unless you are on the ground in the wrong place at the wrong time. If they are above the wings, they will remove the tail and possibly other parts of the aircraft and everything will fall earthward.

In high speed aircraft - parts don't fall. They are swept away by a slip stream that is nearly as solid as a solid. Above or below wing - it makes no difference from an engine disintegration stand point at high speed. Another consideration, high engine mount planes have always had a far superior record of surviving crash landings than under wing engines which tend to cause the plane to cartwheel and centrifugally disintegrate.

Judging from the picture of Lockheed Martin's "inverted-V" engine-under wing configuration, either the picture is upside down or the engines are on top of the wing.

From a 2010 event came this design from NASA and GE Aviation for a business-type, 20-passenger jet"
"The plane flies on "ultra-quiet turboprop engines"
BTW, this look an awful lot like ATR aircraft flying today.

Most of these are just concepts that will NEVER see the light of day as far as production goes.

Totally uninformed author feeding horse manure to the mushrooms. The aviation industry and our gov. are in total denial to the reality of commercial aviation. The most glaring problems for aviation is:

1. Increasing cost and declining availability of jet fuels.
2. Lack of any cost efficient replacement for commercial jet fuel.

Biofuels are dependent on NPK fertilizers. "P"hosphate in NPK will peak in less than 30 years and based on current population and will be gone in 50-100 years. That's not accounting for an additional 3-5 billion expected population growth in that time period. Ninety five percent of human food production is dependent on NPK fertilizers. There is no known substitute for phosphate. It is those same food crops with which biofuels (especially algae) compete head on. Do we really want to decrease our technical window of opportunity to solve our energy problems - by turning our food fertilizers into fuels for jet travel?

Commercial aviation is totally screwed if we can't come up with light wt. electric power systems - as we have in micro-drone aircraft. That means really powerful, high capacity and very light wt. electrical storage devices.

Military aviation will take all the NPK fertilizer they want to make fuels from biofuels (and or human lipids) based on" national security" needs as they see them.

Wonder when joint China/Russia group will start producing these things? USA is so bogged down in politics 101 by a bunch of greedy power hungry fools, we can kiss any real future in aviation goodbye, along with all that has left USA already, Greed rules in USA, not sciences, R&D or good of nation, just the lust for greed/power and it shows.

Does not look super likely to me. Great Russian racism makes them sorta unlikely to ever get along well with the Chinese, and the Chinese seem to me to feel awfully superior to the Russians. This is just a marriage that ain't on.

Chinese-American co-operation, on the other hand, seems to me likely to be a big element of the future. There's a healthy degree of mutual admiration -- although China's engineer-centered government sneers at our lawyer-entered one -- and the two societies are deeply intertwined.

-dlj.

"Mach 0.55 for 800 nautical miles"

Doesn't that convert to about 418 miles per hour for 920.62 miles?

That does not seem like a very long range.

And, what are "virtual reality" windows?