The Plane That Will Change Travel Forever

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Credits:
Writer/Narrator: Brian McManus

References:
References:

Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images
Thank you to AP Archive for access to their archival footage.

Thank you to my patreon supporters: Adam Flohr, Henning Basma, Hank Green, William Leu, Tristan Edwards, Ian Dundore, John & Becki Johnston. Nevin Spoljaric, Jason Clark, Thomas Barth, Johnny MacDonald, Stephen Foland, Alfred Holzheu, Abdulrahman Abdulaziz Binghaith, Brent Higgins, Dexter Appleberry, Alex Pavek, Marko Hirsch, Mikkel Johansen, Hibiyi Mori. Viktor Józsa, Ron Hochsprung

[RealEngineering]

Spiral notebooks sold out, but the moleskin styles ones are still in stock!

[HipyoTech]

Honey lets go visit the Bahamas in our stealth bomber

[Warekiwi]

As a retired 737 pilot, (EVERY version except MAX), aircraft engineer, and simulator instructor I think this is one of your best videos yet! Not only did you cover most of the good and bad issues of blended wing aircraft but you gave one of the best descriptions of the 737 MAX debacle I've yet heard.

[AlbertaGeek]

I'd be willing to bet that those failures being due to having a single sensor rather than redundant systems can be traced back to one or more executives earning themselves a bonus because by eliminating redundancy from the original designs they managed to save the company a miniscule amount in production and maintenance costs. This sort of shit usually comes down to the suits having no clue.

[Kags]

I find it incredible how I can sit and absorb your videos for 25-30+ minutes without ever losing focus. Especially impressive is how I leave feeling like I have at least some grasp of the content matter, despite my lack of engineering experience. Truly well done, you might someday consider making a video about the design process and challenges of making your own videos.

[dictolory]

"I pay for whole wing, I'll use whole wing"

[PlasmaChannel]

This video was extremely comprehensive and well done. Love the work put into it. A+ quality product, learned a ton.

[penaplaster]

I’m almost speechless after realizing how much of preparation and production it took to make this great video. What fascinates me the most is that I can watch this for free. This is insane. Huge thanks to the author. You’re making the world a better place.

[erictaylor]

9:45 Fun fact: The Wright Flier, the worlds very first airplane was designed to be unstable. Both the wing and the canard provided lift, meaning if the plane left level flight it would be pushed father out of level flight by the passive forces.
This was a deliberate design choice by the Wright Brothers, but subsequent airplane designers disagreed with this design philosophy and future aircraft designs were made to be stable, as you described.
For the Centennial celibration of the Wright Brothers first flight a replica Wright Flier was built. Several highly trained and experienced test pilots tried to fly it, landed and refused to try again because the plane was so difficult to control.
I'm not sure if the first flight was actually reenacted, but it makes that first flight even more impressive when you think about the fact that test pilots with thousands of hours of flight time were afraid to fly this plane, and the Wright Brothers did it with no flight experience at all.
Can you imagine walking out to an airport, renting a Cessna 172 (one of the easiest planes in the world to fly) and teaching yourself to fly it by climbing in and taking off? You could, in theory do this. Flying an airplane isn't much harder than driving a car. But it would be highly illegal.
But this was how the first generation of pilots learned to fly. Except they were not renting airplanes carefully designed by aeronautical engineers to be easy to fly. They were flying planes they built themselves with no understanding of aeronautical engineering whatsoever. Or at best very little knowledge.
Early aviation is a wild and crazy story with plenty of death.

[midgetwars]

"Faster boarding times" SOLD. Let's do it

[beatmoralimprove]

This was a very well-researched piece, because you caught a lot of the "why we haven't done this yet" problems, which I suspect was your goal. If I may offer a few criticisms...
--"Tube and Wing" was in play from the late 1910's or earlier, and the fact you were specifically talking about jets isn't really relevant for the class of plane being discussed? The reference to fixed diameter tubes later helped specify what you were referring to, but it's still going to be confusing.
--You've conflated 'horizontal stabilizer', 'tail', and 'vertical stabilizer' a lot here. The reason the flying wing design without a vertical stabilizer (and instead relying on fly-by-wire) was chosen for the B-2 was always because RCS (Radar Cross Section) was the selected trait to minimize by engineering. You can have vertical stabilization _and_ be a flying wing. Even the original Horton prototypes and some later intermediate prototypes still had passive vertical stabilization, as did the more recent civilian prototypes you've discussed.
--The chart with "fuel consumption per passenger over time" I think is labelled as "per decade" when you meant "per year", given that it went from 100 to 50, in 50 years, and the numbers cited were between 1-5%.
--Flying wings are weird, but you made no mention of the stability gained by allowing for dihedral wings (as observed in literally every civilian and non-military or fly-by-wire prototype shown), as opposed to the semi-anhedral (because the B-2 is both weird and classified) of the B-2 (which, as it's the only full-scale production flying wing is really the only production reference). No mention either while talking drag of the unusual trans-sonic effects in addition to lifting stress of tube and wing designs fighting the Sears-Haack or Whitcomb-area. Of especial note is how the flying wing/lifting wing must not have a tail to follow these, but can still have vertical stabilizers.
--I'm not sure how much research has gone into this(cargo), but a lot of the 'pressure hull' problems actually disappear for cargo applications as they don't require life support, and given the lifting body characteristics I think it would be worth mentioning that designing a flying wing that could contain 2-3 shipping containers that, while remaining sealed or venting the container without surface breach could carry those containers (potentially full of vaccine or medical supplies) halfway around the world, given the known characteristics of the B-2 alone?
--Mention the engine mounting problems of a flying wing vs. the weight distribution? Thrust alignment on these things is hard (Read: takeoff vs. cruise problem), and needs to be strongly considered as the 3rd element to center of mass/center of lift, but you only passingly touched on it in wing+tube alone?

Just some thoughts based on aviation engineering subtleties I've run into, trying to align this more with some of your previous videos (since I know you've discussed anhedral/dihedral before), and reference for some deeper insights for others to discover. I love that you're taking a serious look at the topic, and bringing what was once a fringe aviation thing out into the limelight for other engineering enthusiasts to feast on!

[davidfplace]

I found the explanation of passive stability control in standard airframes to be especially clear.

[edmundworrell]

This is the best teaching audio-video that I have ever watched & heard. It is dense with information and not a single word is superfluous or wasted.
Taking notes in notebooks slows the student down so he/she can come at a concept from different angles until it is thoroughly understood.

[Gstrangeman]

That notebook is gorgeous.

If you'd released it two years ago I would have bought the hell out of it and it might have made my dissertation's research phase a lot more productive.

Even now that I'm not really doing anything close to engineering it might still be the very first piece of Youtuber merch I buy.

[erikbertram]

13:20 although I love blaming software as an engineer, I must say that this is not bad software, but bad system design. Writing better code doesn't add redundant sensors.

[reecewitcher]

I took flight mechanics last semester and you just condensed the major topics into a well done 30 minute video. Keep up the amazing work

[gabor_ujvarosi]

Thanks! Awefully informative and inspiring video.

[bloubear]

I remember years back when this design was just a joke online, and there were plenty of edits with different airline liveries. Didnt expect the world to steer towards this in our timeline

[seth]

I'm glad you covered the cabin pressure factor. This was a concern of mine when we were working on our supersonic commercial flight capstone project as we started deviating from the cylindrical fuselage configuration.

One important limitation not covered here is the height vs width of the airframe. If the internal cabin is to be high enough for passengers to walk around, the wingspan must be much larger than that of conventional regional airliners that carry 100 or so passengers. At that point, you might as well add more rows of seats. Its likely we will never see a regional airliner or charter plane of this design for this reason, mainly just international flights where you can sell the extra several hundred seats. If the industry is forced in that direction, they will have to compensate by scheduling less frequent flights to fill the seats.

[tonyscaria]

This was the topic that I used for my seminar during my university days. I found the BWB (blended wing body) concept extremely fascinating at the time. I was so into it that I referred to so many journals and articles.
It's so wonderful to see that Real Engineering also used some of the articles that I used.
Of course, he did a better job in explaining the stuff in a more technical way than whatever I did when I was younger.
Have watched a lot of videos of Real Engineering, but this one was a wee bit personal and I loved it. 😍
Thank you Real Engineering! :)