Airbus earlier this week announced that it had completed Phase 2 of its AlbatrossONE program, with its large scale model of an Airbus airliner with revolutionary wings completed extensive testing, including a flight that took it from gate to air to gate.
What’s the point? Well, everyone knows that early would be aircraft designers went down a box canyon by trying to create machines that imitated the flapping wing motion of birds, which were (and remain) the most sophisticated flying things on the planet. Those attempts were abandoned some time before the Wrights’ first flight at Kitty Hawk on a brisk December day in 1903, as airplanes started getting the far easier-to-conceptualize and -build fixed wing aircraft that have become the sole design approach for anything this side of rotorcraft. Even helicopter rotors are essentially fixed wings that rotate to produce lift. The physics of bird flight are daunting. It hasn’t been until the past couple of decades that they were well understood, and even today it’s safe to say we have much to learn. But we do understand the basics of how birds in general modify the shape, size, camber, chord, aspect ratio and rigidity, and more, to achieve flight profiles we can only dream about for our aircraft.
Putting them into actual flying structures, well, that’s a whole different ballgame. The materials and methods are only now in the age of super computers and nano structures coming to the point where engineers can successfully replicate even some of the basics of what birds do with their wings. And Airbus, 115 plus years down the road from the Wrights, are at work on doing just that.
The company’s AlbatrossONE project, which it launched a couple of years ago, has made tremendous progress, and this week Airbus announced the results of its latest testing of the concept, and the video tells the tale.
In tests at its facilities with a giant scale twin-jet, Airbus completed a demonstration of what its semi-aeroelastic wingtip-equipped airfoils could do. It’s beyond impressive.
Those wingtips are far longer than conventional airliner tips, so they need to be folded up 90 degrees in order to allow future full-sized aircraft to use standard, full-sized terminal gates. Once the plane gets to the runway, the tips are folded back down.
The concept behind it is simple enough. The tips, instead of falling victim to the vagaries of the air the plane is flying through, turbulence, wind shear and more, adjust nearly instantaneously to the air, preventing the tips from approaching stall and stabilizing flight from high-speed cruise down to approach. The benefits are improved fuel economy, fewer and less extreme bumps for the passengers and improved safety margins. All of which are huge and already make the aeroelastic wingtips very promising, if not a lock to be on future airliners, and just perhaps, on small planes, too. For more info, check out Airbus’ article on the technology and its video on the fight tests.
