The Italians developed fuels made from plant oils, particularly oily herbs which grow well in their climate. The oregano-oil fuelled planes never got off the ground, but Mussolini made the trains run on thyme.
Cheers
Er what?
How do you thi9nk the carbon got into fossil fuels in the first place?
From the atmosphere stoopid. Via plants.
Well like the world beating greeks and man have 'just changed' eh? And the Aztecs and the Mayans.. now cleaning your hotel berdroom and making the bed.
just like they did from what they had before
No, but the body is mostly empty space and contributes little weight. Or lift. A little sure.
From a passenger point of view the body should be as big as possible for comfort. Apart from the drag the body is merely there to toe tey flying surfaces together at minimum weight.
The smallness of the wings is more about wing loading and top speed. Ideally they should be only just big enough to keep the plane in the air at cruise speed - as lots more wing area is wound out for takeoff and landing, and more area is more drag..
Doesn?t happen at anything like the rate at which we use them today.
Nothing like in fact.
Nothing like in fact.
I thought high aspect ratio wings (slim but long wings) were desired to provide more lift at relatively slower speeds (due to structural difficulties [1])and less induced drag(at the cost of increased parasitic drag). Even if they do reduce maneuverability (not a deal-breaker with commercial aircraft).
This high aspect ratio has been taken to extreme lengths in some of the modern sailplanes.
Bloody hell!, do they come down at all?, must make "packing the hanger" a real awkward job!...
But you can maybe envisage some sort of regenerative braking which would help a little. All that 1/2 mv^2 and mgh which took so much energy to attain is wasted.
Cheers
In-flight recharging by flying through thunderstorms is the answer.
Or using ultra-violet lasers to create an ionised path through the air to connect to grid lines.
Cheers
The 787 will do that as well before the wings break (but hopefully not just before landing)
Brilliant!
Only the brain dead have a hope the morons will come to realise it's all a load of codswallop?
Saw an old geyser in outback Australia with a truck he ran from charcoal burner. made his own charcoal too.
On 05/08/2015 09:15, Nightjar There was also a nuclear ram jet engine tested, but leaving a trail of
As in Arthur Clarke's "Prelude to Space", which he says he wrote in 1947
- even though the first UK edition wasn't until 1953.
That was however for a more peaceful purpose - getting man to the moon. And the launch area was the Australian desert.
Andy
Really? By what route?
Andy
The problem with air transport isn't the MPG, it's the miles.
I've been to California twice in the last year on business. That's more than I've done in a car by a long way.
Andy
Next time you're near a modern airliner have a look at the wing sections. Inboard they are classic asymmetric airfoils, much more curved on top. Outboard they look to me to be close to the NACA 000x sections - symmetric laminar flow - and I suspect are doing nothing at cruise except get in the way.
Andy
They do more than just get in the way. That's why the approach of very long thin wings work for efficiency and the tip fences and winglets too.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.