May 2009 Archives

Wings which force air to waggle sideways could cut airline fuel bills by 20% according to research funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Airbus.

The new approach, which promises to dramatically reduce mid-flight drag, uses tiny air powered jets which redirect the air, making it flow sideways back and forth over the wing.

The jets work by the Helmholtz resonance principle - when air is forced into a cavity the pressure increases, which forces air out and sucks it back in again causing an oscillation - the same phenomenon that happen when blowing over a bottle.

Dr Duncan Lockerby, from the University of Warwick, who is leading the project, said: "This has come as a bit of a surprise to all of us in the aerodynamics community. It was discovered, essentially, by waggling a piece of wing from side to side in a wind tunnel."

"The truth is we're not exactly sure why this technology reduces drag but with the pressure of climate change we can't afford to wait around to find out. So we are pushing ahead with prototypes and have a separate three-year project to look more carefully at the physics behind it."

Engineers have known for some time that tiny ridges known as 'riblets' - like those found on sharks bodies - can reduce skin-friction drag, (a major contorbiutor to mid-flight drag), by around 5%. But the new micro-jet system being developed by Dr Lockerby and his colleagues could, they claim, reduce skin friction drag by up to 40%.

The research, being carried out with scientists at Cardiff, Imperial, Sheffield, and Queen's University Belfast, is still at concept stage although it is hoped the new wings could be ready for trials as early as 2012.

Dr Lockerby tells Future Proof: "The wings/aircraft surface make the airflow "waggle" rather than the wings waggle structurally... which would be quite disconcerting to the passengers I sense.

"We envision many thousands of small cavities sunk within the surface of the aircraft. Each cavity would have one or a series of outlets that air would flow in and out of; directed perpendicular to the direction of travel.

"This creates an oscillation in the airflow very near to the surface - the boundary layer - which, via a physical mechanism we are working to fully understand, reduces the frictional drag."

US military research scientists at DARPA have asked Boeing for help in exploiting the aerodynamic benefits of formation flying to save fuel in military aircraft.

Called "Formation Flight For Aerodynamic Benefit", the effort builds on previous work by NASA in 2001-2002 which used a pair of specially instrumented F18 jets.

According to the report on those trials, significant performance benefits were obtained during the flight test phase.

Drag reductions of more than 20 per cent and fuel flow reductions of more than 18 per cent were measured at flight conditions of Mach 0.56 and an altitude of 25,000 ft.

The Register reports that the NASA project was intended to move forward and actually demonstrate fuel savings over a long flight, and develop autopilot equipment which could hold following jets exactly in the sweet spot for best results relative to the aircraft ahead.

However the NASA effort was shelved due to funds drying up. 

Although not an entirely new concept, aircraft flying in formation could offer a way of increasing range of aircraft in formation without transferring fuel.

"This opens a new design space for aircraft conceived and operated as a networked system. As always, there are challenges to overcome. One challenge is precisely maintaining the relative position of two aircraft, or many aircraft, to take full advantage of the reduction in drag due to lift. Only birds now do this routinely, and they can't explain it to us ..." says the agency's Dr Thomas Beutner. 

The Boeing deal will see an initial simulation phase before flight tests in the wake of a large military transport aircraft. Later work could see autonomous self separation using stationkeeping equipment - possibly applied to manned or unmanned future aircraft fleets custom designed operated as networked systems.

You'd be justifiably alarmed to see an aircraft's wing twist through 45 degrees, but the flapping wings of a hoverfly deform like this 300 times every second.

Add to this a large flap which flips up at right angles to the rest of the wing during manoeuvres, and you have what is generally termed an "unconventional" configuration.

With the aid of lasers and high-speed cameras filming at 4000 frames per second, Oxford University scientists have begun to unravel the hoverfly's secrets by reconstructing how the wings' three-dimensional shape changes through the stroke.

Intriguingly, the hinged flap at the base of the wing seems to be intimately involved in the hoverfly's extraordinary manoeuvering performance.

Aircraft designers are unlikely to stop using rigid wings anytime soon, but for small and highly manoeuvrable micro-aircraft, bendy wings might just be the next big thing. Watch the video here.  

A report of the research, 'Deformable wing kinematics in free-flying hoverrflies', is published online in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface.

 The research was undertaken by Dr Simon Walker, Professor Adrian Thomas and Dr Graham Taylor of the Oxford Animal Flight Group, part of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. 
 

NASA has managed to tick all the green boxes with their latest effort to link algae-based fuel production with a cheap method of sewage treatment - growing algae for biofuel in plastic bags full of shite floating in the ocean.

The effort which comes out of NASA's Ames Research Center in California, has three goals: produce biofuels with few resources in a confined area, help cleanse wastewater, and capture carbon dioxide.

As Scientific American reports, the process starts with algae being placed in sewage-filled semipermeable membranes specially developed by NASA to recycle astronauts' wastewater on space missions.

The membranes let freshwater leave but prevent saltwater from moving in. The algae then feast on nutrients in the sewage bag, cleansing the water and producing lipids used later as fuel.

And apparently even if the bags leak, the saltwater would kill the freshwater algae, preventing the escape of an invasive species.

Manchester Airport will be the first in the UK to buy a scanning system used in cancer hospitals to detect explosives in luggage.

It has ordered a Rapiscan RTT high-speed baggage screening system which uses computed tomography, or CT, scans of the type used in medicine to estimate the size of tumours.

Airports generally use x-rays to scan baggage because CT scans, although more effective, take too long. Rapiscan's new RTT machine , whose name stands for real time tomography, delivers 3-D images claims to work just as quickly as an x-ray.

The machine can also detect viscosity levels in liquids, alerting security staff to fluids containing explosives.

Rapiscan which is headquartered in California, owns a UK cargo division in Congleton which makes machines for scanning cargo and vehicles while its CXR research and development arm, set up a base in the UK in 2006 to collaborate with the University of Manchester on 3-D scanning.

A higher level of research and development spend by Europe neither guarantees future innovations will come from Europe nor delivers more creativity, higher profit or a greater market share, according to one US-based think tank.

A new study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concludes that while Europeans spend a lot on R&D, much of what they develop is not commercially useful. This would explain relatively high R&D expenses per employee, but low conversion of R&D spending into sales.

US companies, on the other hand, commercialize their R&D more effectively, getting more sales out of a given level of research investment. This, they argue, is consistent with relatively larger defence procurements; for US companies, investment in a new product is more likely to result in relatively larger sales. It is also consistent with the pressure to perform the capital markets place on US public companies.

Do European companies really spend more seeking innovation, while their transatlantic cousins are more likely to find and commercialize it?

European airframer Airbus has just announced it is to sell and provide required navigation performance (RNP) services to air navigation authorities, airlines and airports through a new 100 per cent subsidiary called Quovadis.

Services on offer from July 2009 will range from RNP procedures design, testing and flight operations packaging, to RNP training.

To support the new business, Airbus has signed a cooperation agreement for RNP procedure design with the French Civil Aviation University (ENAC) in Toulouse, and CGx AERO in SYS, a specialist in aeronautical and geographic information systems based in Castres, France.

Check out this series of video which show what US based procedures design specialist Naverus do in this area and Flight's latest environment special report on advanced air navigation procedures.

Remember Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics?

Namely:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Well, these crazy guys at DLR - or the German Aerospace Centre - are on their way to Kobe, Japan, for the IEEE International Conference of Robotics and Automation where they attempt to depict experiments of robots crashing into human test dummies.

As the journalist from Engadget points out, the guys who videoed their experiements, obviously took a sadistic pleasure in their research which explores human-robot accidents so that robots can be made safer. Check out the cold-blooded laughter after the first gruesome impact.... far too reminiscent of the Stanford Prison Experiment if you ask me....

Did you read my blog posting disputing the claim that the three-day absence of contrails had a significant influence on the climate post-9/11?

According to US scientists who studied US skies after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the absence of artificial clouds caused by the grounding of all civil aircraft triggered variations in the earth's temperature range by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) each day.

Here's a great video to watch about those original claims.

Computers have a big advantage over humans when it comes to processing large amounts of data accurately and quickly, according to defence giant Lockheed Martin.

Unlike humans, however, computers lack the intellectual wherewithal to deduce and predict from that data an object's behaviour and patterns.

Now, engineers at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) are using brain-inspired computing techniques to enable machines to think like humans.

My favourite?

Brain-Inspired Attentional Search or mind reading that works as it is otherwise being called.

This is Lockheed Martin's take on it: to search an image database, a human uses a keyword to find a particular photograph, assuming that someone earlier correctly annotated the images for them to be found.

At the rate that visual data pours into command centres, annotating every image is nearly impossible.

So ATL engineers are developing a Brain-Inspired Attentional Search technology that will in effect read a person's mind for the image being searched as related images flash by.

Sensors monitor the brain's electrical activity and chart a spike when the analyst sees the desired image, even if the analyst didn't consciously "see" it. Moving at a rate of 10 images per second, an analyst could search 600 photos a minute.

The UK government's environmental czar remains unconvinced by industry technology-borne claims that carbon emissions could return to 2000 levels by 2050.

Appearing before the parliamentary transport committee Lord Smith, Environment Agency chairman, said the true environmental cost of aviation was not being met, adding he did not believe either passengers or airlines were paying to cover climate change and health effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other local air pollution impacts.
 
"The aviation industry is now having to make its case more clearly than it was before, and rightly so. The question of the expansion of aviation into the future needs to be related to the climate change targets we have set as a country and I don't think that has yet been done, either by the aviation industry or, indeed, by government."

The recent claims to which Lord Smith referred were made by Sustainable Aviation, a coalition of UK airlines, airports, aerospace manufacturers and ATM providers, which last December published its first report mapping the air transport industry's carbon emissions to 2050.
 
Its forecast of returning to 2000 levels by 2050 relies heavily on a vision of a maturing UK air transport combined with anticipated efficiencies from new airframe and engine technology, advanced air traffic management and operations, as well as the sustainable fuel development - although market-based measures such as cap and trade emission schemes were not counted.

Lord Smith said the UK needed to make a strategic decision as to how in 2050 the 20% of national carbon limit would be allocated between sectors. "Where aviation fits into that picture, and to what extent, seems to me to be the most important question that we need to decide if we're looking at the long term future of the aviation industry," he said.

Watch the video and scoot to 1.36.50 secs.
 

The idea that the absence of contrails caused by jet aircraft had a significant influence on the climate post-9/11 has been challenged by a team of UK and German scientists.

According to US scientists who studied US skies after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the absence of artificial clouds caused by the grounding of all civil aircraft triggered variations in the earth's temperature range by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) each day.

But follow-up work by a number of scientists working independently have shown that the observed change in the daily temperature range or DTR was likely a statistical quirk associated with the weather and that contrails by themselves are likely only to have a very minor effect on DTR.

After all, they reckon, such a 1 degree Celsius change in climate change terms would be a very large effect - for comparison, global warming over the last 100 years is pegged at around 0.7 Celsius.

"The theory is that contrails suppress DTR by cooling daytime temperatures and warming night-time temperatures, so in their absence DTR increases," Professor Piers Forster from the University of Leeds tells Future Proof. 

The UK and German studies which incorporated contrails into their respective state-of-the-art climate models actually found that contrails over the US do indeed suppress DTR, but only by a tiny amount.

The UK study led by Leeds University within the aviation research initiative Omega which joined forces with the UK Met Office found that it would take 200 times as many flights over the US as there are today to see DTR changes approaching those seen in the US work conducted by David Travis of the University of Wisconsin.

A further US study by Hong and colleagues has re-examined the temperature data for the US, not only looking at the 2001 data but going back to earlier Septembers. They found that such 1 degree Celsius changes in DTR were not uncommon and that the 2001 DTR change was most likely caused by changes in wind direction affecting low cloud cover.

And for those non-believers, here are the academic references:

Dietmuller, S., Ponater, M., Sausen, R., Hoinka, K.P., and Pechtl, S., 2008: Contrails, natural clouds, and diurnal temperature range. Journal of Climate, 21(19), 5061-5075.

Forster and Rap, OMEGA study http://www.omega.mmu.ac.uk/Studies/Adding%20to%20a%20climate%20model.pdf

Hong, G., Yang, P., Minnis, P., Hu, Y.X., and North, G., 2008: Do contrails significantly reduce daily temperature range?. Geophysical Research Letters, 35(23), L23815.

Travis, D.J., Carleton, A.M., and Lauritsen, R.G.,2002:Climatology: Contrails reduce daily temperature range - A brief interval when the skies were clear of jets unmasked an effect on climate. Nature, 418(6898), 601-601.

Check out Nikolaus Correll's work, a post-doctoral associate at the Distributed Robotics Lab, MIT CSAIL, where he works with Daniela Rus on a wide variety of multi-robot systems.

In his PhD thesis at Lausanne-based EPFL he has studied how a group of tiny sugar-cube size robots - mimicking the behaviour of cow herds and cockroaches in nature - could be used to inspect a jet turbine engine.

Correll presents the trade-offs between having purely reactive robot controllers or robots that plan and how collaboration between the robots affects the performance of the system.

Check out the video and his thesis.

Israeli high-tech company Opgal has launched a thermal imaging system that can detect individuals with elevated body temperatures, something which could help contain the spread of Swine Flu when installed in airports.

Medical News reports that the Opgal system consists of a highly-sensitive infrared thermal camera integrated with customized software and sophisticated algorithms so that it can detect differences in body temperature smaller than 0.5° C.

One of the symptoms of Swine Flu is a high fever of over 100.4° F (38C). The system screens real-time thermal images to detect individuals passing through its field of view whose body temperatures exceed a pre-set threshold, and flags individuals with elevated temperatures.

When the camera detects such an individual it gives off an alarm and the person can be pulled aside for further medical evaluation.

"This non-invasive system can be immediately deployed in airports and other transportation hubs since it does not require any special infrastructure," said Opgal CEO Dror Sharon.

In 2003 Opgal sold more than 300 units of a similar thermal scanner to Asian nations during the SARS crisis. Opgal is owned by Rafael and Elbit Systems and is a manufacturer of thermal and optical imaging products for use in public safety, paramilitary, navigation and search and rescue operations

One radical vision of future air travel according to tomorrow's engineers is windowless passenger aircraft flying in formation.

These are just some of the ideas proposed within an initiative from Airbus to offer €30,000 for the best idea drawn from proposals. Over 2,000 students in 82 countries took part after the European airframer launched a global competition for new concepts.

Airbus says it has now narrowed down the entries to five which could lead to useful ways of thinking about aircraft design and engineering.

The proposals include a suggestion from a Spanish university for an eco-efficient windowless cabin. Another shortlisted concept hails from an Australian team from the University of Queensland which has suggested using composite cabin components made out of castor plant natural fibres.

A Czech proposal would use electric motors to taxi the aircraft while Singapore students want to tap solar power for electricity.

Perhaps the most revolutionary concept is a US proposal by students from Stanford University to adapt the "V" formation used by slipstreaming geese where aircraft are separated by minimum distances depending on their size to reduce the risk of collision and prevent turbulence from the wingtips of those directly in front.

"This is not necessarily something we would exploit, but the idea and approach are interesting and the analysis is of high quality," says Airbus.

Indeed the European think-tank Out of the Box also looked at formation flying (see above image from our Future Concepts gallery) and concluded that obstacles to fuel-efficient tight formation flying in the classic V formation would be the adverse effects from weight dependent vortices from the wings of the lead aircraft.

Vortices are a function of weight and commercial airliners are substantially heavier than all other aircraft that have attempted close formation flying. Conceptually, the benefits are considerable however and long range travel could be substantially more economical with cruise fuel savings up to 40%.

As far as windowless cabins go, OOTB boffins reckons the idea is especially interesting with regards to studies being currently conducted on blended wing aircraft where passengers would probably be seated well away from any windows.

Not only would the absence of windows increase flexibility of cabin design and layout, but virtual reality simulations could easily be employed to represent the flight in progress at different altitudes and even over different terrain.

Airbus says it launched the contest to challenge students in to seek innovative and green-friendly ideas that could ultimately shape the future of aviation.

The five finalists who will present their ideas to a jury at the Paris Air Show in June are:

 - The "Big Bang Team" from Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in Spain for its windowless cabin proposal for a new eco-efficient aircraft design.
-  "COz" from the University of Queensland, Australia for its proposal on the use of bio composite cabin materials made from castor plant natural fibres.
- "Kometa Brno" from Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic whose team developed a project on aircraft taxiway movements using electro-motors.
- "Solaire Voyager" from the National University of Singapore, selected for its solar cell technology project integrating photovoltaic cells aboard aircraft to generate electricity.
- "Stanford ADG" from Stanford University in the USA for their proposal on inverted V formation flight, building on the model of migrating birds to reduce energy consumption.

Worrying news from the other side of the Pond....

The US Federal Aviation Administration has just admitted that the nation's air traffic control systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks following a top level probe into systems security.

A government report by the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General has revealed that support systems have been breached in recent months allowing hackers access to personnel records and network servers.

Crucially, investigators say those breaches could potentially compromise vital operational systems that control communications, surveillance and flight separation information.

The recent cyber attacks - which included a February incident where hackers gained access to personal information on about 48,000 current and former FAA employees, and an attack in 2008 when hackers took control of some FAA network servers - have led auditors to conclude that the FAA is not able to adequately detect potential cyber security attacks.

Incidents that the investigators highlighted include the fact that in 2006, the FAA's Remote Maintenance Monitoring System was connected to the less-secure mission-support network, which created security exposure to ATC operations.

In the same year, a viral attack originating from the internet spread from administrative networks to ATC systems, forcing FAA to shut down a portion of its ATC systems in Alaska.

Last year, hackers took over FAA computers in Alaska, becoming FAA "insiders." By taking advantage of FAA's interconnected networks, hackers later stole FAA's enterprise administrator's password in Oklahoma, installed malicious codes with the stolen password, and compromised FAA's domain controller in its Western Pacific Region.

At that point, hackers could have obtained more than 40,000 FAA user IDs, passwords, and other information used to control a portion of the FAA mission-support network.

Last year, hackers also compromised an FAA public-facing web application computer on the Internet and used it to enter an FAA internal database server. Included in the server was data on 48,000 current and former FAA employees, including names, dates of birth, social security numbers, pay grades/bands, addresses, veterans' preferences, usernames and passwords, and education/medical/health information.

"These web vulnerabilities occurred because firstly web applications were not
adequately configured to prevent unauthorized access and secondly web application software with known vulnerabilities was not corrected in a timely manner by installing readily available security software patches released to the public by software vendors," says the report.

"In our opinion, unless effective action is taken quickly, it is likely to be a matter of when, not if, air traffic control systems encounter attacks that do serious harm to operations," say the investigators who went on to recommend that the FAA must secure its systems against hackers and other intruders.

In response to the findings, FAA officials stressed that the support systems and traffic control networks are indepeendent from each other.

"The Office of Inspector General did release a report that stated that FAA's computers are vulnerable to cyber attacks. We want to emphasize that the FAA's Air Traffic Organization uses two types of major networks that are separated physically and logically.

"One provides mission support for administrative functions and the other is used to operate the air traffic system. It is not possible to use the administrative and mission support network to access the air traffic control network. That said, we concur with the Inspector General's recommendations and are working to correct any vulnerabilities."

Artificial intelligence could soon be alerting airlines to potential problems before they jeopardise in-flight safety.

The capability is being developed at the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Industrial Research (IIR) where experts use artificial intelligence techniques for industrial applications.

The programme they've been working on analyses data recorded in an aircraft's black box after every flight and flags up abnormalities which fall outside the airline's standard safety parameters. 

It highlights even tiny aberrations in the flight data which would usually go undetected, allowing an airline to investigate and take remedial action if necessary before safety is compromised.

Flight data monitoring is usually a semi-automated process carried out on a flight by flight basis using a set of pre-defined safety criteria which check for known problems.

The new system works by comparing flights against each other and looks for similarities within apparently random sequences of data. Those which are most similar are grouped together to identify recurring patterns and anomalies during a flight. 

The IIR's Dr David Brown, says: "Every flight generates masses of data generated from dozens of instruments and hundreds of information feeds, requiring hours of labour intensive scrutiny by skilled observers. This intelligent software will do the same job in a fraction of the time and will identify data that would never have been detected by a human being. It literally looks for the needle in the proverbial haystack."

Airlines are required to monitor data from all passenger flights over 27 tonnes. This includes aircraft ranging from 10 seat corporate jets to commercial jets seating up to 850 passengers, such as the Airbus A380.

The IIR is developing the programme in conjunction with Hampshire-based flight data monitoring company Flight Data Services in the UK. The programme is expected to be completed later this year when it will be incorporated into the services it provides to its own customer airlines.

"In this industry, safety is everything. Flagging up potential safety issues early means that airlines can take any necessary corrective measures and ensure their operations are as safe as they can possibly be," says Flight Data Services's David Jesse.

The programme is being developed in response to the industry's need for a more comprehensive and accurate system of flight data monitoring although Dr Brown points out that the results could be used to analyse inefficient operations and reduce fuel consumption and emissions.

Rolls-Royce is notorious for keeping its cards close to its chest, but the battle lines are well and truly being drawn in the race to power future narrowbodies.

As Alan Newby, Rolls-Royce's chief engineer for advanced projects, explained at the recent Royal Aeronautical Society's Facing The Future conference, a look at the newspaper cuttings from as far back as December 2005 reveals absurdly optimistic reports of an industry confident of a A320/Boeing 737 replacement by 2012

Yes, that's wasn't a typo - they really did think it would be 2012 back then. 

How we laughed ....

Anyway, Newby confirms that Rolls-Royce believes its "holy grail" quest for a low-noise high-efficiency open rotor engine to power these next generation beasts could finally have ended following promising ongoing tests on a 71cm (28in) diameter rig at the UK's Aircraft Research Association windtunnel in Bedford which is conducting the high-speed performance testing.

One of Newby's slides revealed the chosen nomenclature of this game-changing engine architecture: the RB 3011. On investigating the provenance of this, FutureProof found that an earlier "working title" of the self same engine had been the RB 2011 - but that was changed because people even internally just kept confusing it with the engine's entry into service. Doh!   

Read more about the issues surrounding open rotor technology.

As an experienced technology expert and strategist, Professor Terry Knibb, BAE Systems's chief scientist, gets awfully excited about those breakthrough technologies that promise to radically shrink the environmental footprint of air transport.

But even he has to admit that sometimes it's hard to take the whole industry with you.

Speaking at the Royal Aeronautical Society's recent Facing Up To The Future conference he told delegates about the efforts of the European Out of the Box (OOTB) think tank which was set the task to come up with some pretty radical ideas about future air travel.

Linking people and their luggage with the aircraft was one of them, an effort that would feature advanced IT devices to assist the passenger, advanced security and tracking systems, advanced airport design features and even new aircraft design including a more modular design.

The objective? To speed the passenger onto the aircraft in seamless fashion - from the front doors of their homes to their ultimate destination. 

But they hit one snag. They didn't take into account: the fact that an airport's economic model has come to rely heavily on the revenues from passenger spend...those passengers who, as Knibb pointed out, "spend hours wandering around bored out of their skulls". 

Oh dear. Back to the drawing boards, chaps! 

He explained how support for these blue sky concepts has grown out of the work of a high level European air transport forum which in 2001 published a vision on the requirements of the air transport system in 2020 setting out quantitative goals in CO2, NOx and noise reductions while increasing safety levels.

This forum, the Advisory Council for Aeronautic Research in Europe (ACARE), urged that in order to stimulate any technological step change in the second half of this century, the European Commission would need to get some pretty bold visioneers to identify those novel concepts and technologies that would demand revolutionary changes to the system.

The OOTB project was duly established with the brief to be forward looking rather than be expected to deliver immediate technological solutions.

Initial studies resulted in 100 far-out and not so far-out ideas which were then whittled down to those seen as holding the most promise, offering the prospect of substantial impact and benefit to the air transport system this side of the 22nd century.

Five further areas which showed near-er term promise:

• Personal air transport systems including a comprehensive concept for the use of such as system which would require bespoke technologies
• Use of ground-based means to reduce airborne mass and power including research into alternative power sources, energy efficiency as well as research into mechanics like water landing, airframe adaptation, parafoils etc
• The airborne cruiser/feeder concept involving large cruisers flying patterns around the globe with smaller feeder aircraft to transfer passengers
• A globalised autonomous aircraft guidance featured a totally automated air traffic control system using autonomous aircraft operations
• New means of propulsion featuring direct energy conversion that dispenses with the turbofan engine, alternative physics, electric chemistry, heat management etc and a different propulsion layout, higher efficiency like plasma aerodynamics.

Learn more about the successor CREating innovative Air transport Technologies for Europe (CREATE) project which aims to stimulate the development and the capture of know-how and technologies which will enable step changes for sustainable air travel in the second half of the century

FutureProof has highlighted some of those 100 ideas and you'll find those at out Gallery of Future Concepts. Click on the images to see a short explanation. 

Gizmag reports on replacing highly expensive space-based satellites and aircraft mounted Airborne Warning And Control Systems (AWACS) with stationary platforms inside Earth's atmosphere. 

US defense contractor Lockheed Martin has apparently been chosen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a US$400 million contract to to design, build, test and fly a 1:3 scale model of an airship surveillance and telecommunications platform called the High Altitude Airship (HAA).

The HAA is an un-tethered, unmanned lighter-than-air vehicle that will operate above the jet stream (more than 70,000 feet / 21 km high) in a geostationary position. From that position, the autonomous flight test system will operate on station for 90 days and the airship will be able to survey a 600-mile (970 km) diameter area and millions of cubic miles of airspace to deliver telecommunications relay, weather data or surveillance. The full scale HAA will be able to stay aloft for up to 10 years.

A geostationary airship offers the same capabilities as a satellites but at a fraction of the cost (1 to 2 orders of magnitude less) and is also significantly less costly to deploy and operate and other airborne platforms such as AWACS and Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS).

The Airship operates in the stratosphere just barely within the outer limits of the earth's atmosphere. The geostationary position of 70,000 feet (21 km) has been selected because there are minimal wind conditions during a significant part of the year at this altitude and the air density is only five percent of that at the surface.

The HAA will be built using high-strength fabrics to minimize hull weight. Lift is provided by helium and leakage, as well as migration of air and water vapor into the helium enclosure, will be minimized by the envelope design. A 15kW thin-film solar array will generate all power required on-station and store it in a 40 kWh Li-ion battery for use by the payload (up to 50lbs) and the 2kW lightweight all-electric propulsion units.

The 500,000 ft³ (14,158.4 m³) airship will measure 240 ft long by 70 ft in diameter (73 x 21 meter) and will be built in the company's Akron Airdock, which is 1,175 feet long, 325 feet wide and 211 feet high (358 x 99x 64 m). The building's height is equal to a 22-story building.