It seems more and more people are becoming aware of the environmental issues and they are trying to do their bid to help the planet that's been keeping us alive. Some people try replacing conventional energy sources with alternative ones, like wind or solar power.
Even aviation engineers are looking for alternatives to the winged cigar that we now call airplane. Long-held notions of flight engineering could be overturned by a usual, yet familiar, new design: flying saucers.
"I want to get rid of the image of a cylindrical body
with wings," said Etnel Straatsma of Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. This doesn't mean we'll be seeing aliens roaming around anytime soon, but our current technology could take a turn for the weird, with radical new designs.
In Straatsma's vision, the plane of the future may come in wild shapes, including the more or less fictional flying saucers that have been haunting movies, sci-fi novels and tabloids for more than half a century.
Straatsma heads the recently-formed CleanEra project, which aims to design an "ultra-eco-friendly plane" that releases 50 percent less carbon dioxide per passenger-mile than current airliners. That doesn't say much, but design illustrations depict this new aircraft as a flying saucer that could reduce pollutants and noise in line with recommendations from the European Aerospace Commission, ACARE.
Modern airplanes seem to have hit an evolutionary dead end, as there's no more room for improvement of the present design. Not even the most daring design modifications could reduce carbon emissions and noise levels by more than 10 to 15 percent.
"These ideas cannot keep up with the 5 percent growth that the [airline] industry continues to have year after year," said Alexander de Haan, also from Delft but not involved with CleanEra, who examined these possible improvement applications.
As air travel currently generates about 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions and could grow to 5 percent by 2050, something must clearly be done about it, explains Andreas Hardeman of the industry group International Air Transport Association.
"Ever since the Boeing 707 first flew in 1957, airliners ... have changed very little in their basic appearance," Hardeman said. "However, because future improvements to the basic design are getting harder to make, economic and environmental pressures mean that the case for radical change is getting stronger."
It's likely that these radical changes will include circular aircraft, much like the ones supposedly transporting visitors from outer space.
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