Maybe there will be a day we can again walk freely about the cabin without overregulation? With blimps, that was the standard. The same for ferries and trains. I personally know I would travel much more if I could affordably walk about the cabin while sight-seeing, it doesn’t matter to me about how fast I get there if the journey was the destination.
Dang, if a variant were made smaller to match or slightly best the current AF1 cabin space, retrofitted with STOL and/or float, a slightly more robust tail & flaring in the case of full power failure as with the LongEZ, and of course fuel bladder and hardening for range & survivability, it could compete utilizing stealth, luxury, comfort, and reliability. Hard to beat, our theoretical perfected hybrid? One thing’s for sure, a guest would sleep comfortably, regardless of the desired cabin size.
Float in place of STOL seems practical, to me. Less moving parts. K.I.S.S. But in 2028, if you can have both, why not?
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A swept back unibody wing might even overcome speed barriers; and low airflow-over-tail events.
Triple-engine hybrid with one being scram? Yes please. Or even two jet + two scram to make four smaller engines all in the rear, modular for low downtime of course. Simple enough to mechanically cover the inlets of our jets at supersonic. Heck, even 3 + 2 or 4 + 1 is possible here as with the clustered triple array.
Arriving rested is the pinnacle of opportunity for success. Beautiful colors in the interim. Consider a rear-only engine design for even smoother travels, and if Boeing doesn’t make it, they ought to be. God bless.
In all my travels, the one time I was most impressed was in a REAR-ENGINE aircraft. SO QUIET, SO SMOOTH. Common sense.
@Donald J. Trump Getting closer, love the stealth, love the speed, love the redundant engines, love the engines in the back, LOVE that there is off-the-shelf to cut costs, but AF1 MUST be able to land on water! Retracted wings are interesting, and check nearly all the boxes, but moving parts are failure points, and an asymmetric failure is most likely, a ghastly scenario? What does nature do? Is there a way to make the wing naturally sweep as a function of velocity non-mechanically?
… does friction from the air cause an electrical in place of heat memory in some alloys? Can thermal- or electro- static memory achieve stability at nearly infinite cycles? Perhaps this is over-engineering, how did the Russians achieve STOL (compounding numerous means) on a fixed wing non-mechanically, and can that be scaled recursively?
Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect circle, the final design converges upon the practical.
And of course, the perfected plane will make the mold for the next century of flight, and beyond! Vertical integration knows no bounds!
.. there’s an urban legend that Scottsbluff, NE is the center of the world. Think vortices. What are the center of vortices by nature, are they calm or turbulent?
The bluffs nearby create a naturally stagnant airflow, except in tornada season (though I think our recent tornada’s are a bit synthetic). You get the idea..
There’s even a domiciled replica of that Pixar character seen traveling around the area, time to time! True story. The people in this area love their cars and planes! And that old Army base (Air Force used to be called Army) which was mothballed is a sight to see, it’s like the imprint of a sleeping giant.
And there’s a LongEZ parked INSIDE the airport lobby, SO COO!..
.. All just a short drive from that strange monument called Carhenge. Strange occult symbolism (and perhaps even energy, I can attest, surreal florescent spray paint prisms the sun’s light with Kodak intention) surrounds this monument, and it was even visited by one Governor Pete Ricketts during the eclipse, this was entirely coincidental and had nothing at all by any stretch to do with the occult. Governor Ricketts visits Carhenge to view eclipse | Grant Tribune
Such as it is, Carhenge, the lighthouse with its plaque, Chimney rock are all must see bucket list, only problem is you’d be hard pressed to find a vertically-integrated reason to visit such a place, except perhaps to land at the fully-massive-aircraft-capable strip to tour for purpose of breathing life back into our sleeping giant.
The lakes nearby are all wonderful candidates for our seaplane idea. Oh and speaking of vertical integration, to visit little old me, of course, for such occasions as when I am not finding myself domiciled in Colorado in exile from captured Colorado.
I might seem a bit eccentric, and my life has been a bit like that dude from that movie Big Fish (I should really get around to fixing that broken contact form a bit later on when there’s less big fish to fry), but I wonder if I put on a slightly different persona in real life? Guess there’s only one way to find out, favorite reader..
I need to find my articles I had written prior about both Ricketts and Pillen, such as it is they are buried under 11,000 posts, whoops! No, it wasn’t this article, but it points in the same direction as the lost articles -
Oh and also inside the same Scottsbluff airport lobby are several other interesting models, like this one..
.. biplanes (and even triplanes) just make sense to me. Less drama, more forgiving, bit of nostalgia certainly, and easier to fly at low speeds and land…
