Lockheed HWB

I recently read about the Lockheed HWB, which looks very similar to the Boeing BWB.

I used to follow the progress of the BWB quite religiously and then after 2013 it mostly went away, went dark like some of you say.

What are the chances theres a full scale HWB or BWB flying today?

And interestingly enough, one of the photos over Texas looks eerily similar to the BWB.

a reply to: BigTrain

Boeing ran into some issues around 2013 with their plan to convert the BWB into a passenger carrying aircraft, and there wasn't a lot of interest in it as a cargo aircraft at the time, so they slowed things down. They had flown a quarter scale model of the design, and now are working on a half sized model.

a reply to: Zaphod58

BWB designs are a complete and total nonstarter for the commercial aircraft market because of the whole "no windows" aspect of the designs. No carrier, regardless of potential cost savings, is going to risk buying an all-new airframe design, only to have customers actively avoiding flying them and start booking their tickets elsewhere once they start realizing that at least 9/10ths of the seats are aisles/middle seats.

On top of that, BWB designs make the most sense for super-heavies, which A380 and 747-8 sales have proved to be a dying (or at least saturated) market. All the sales growth is in 787/A350-sized aircraft where the BWB design is much harder to adapt, and the meat of the aircraft market is still in MRJ/Cseries/E-190 and 737/A320-sized craft, where the BWB design is almost impossible to implement.

And that's totally ignoring the major changes to airport infrastructure that BWB's would require due to their larger wingspans and drastically different passenger loading processes.

They might make sense for cargo, but the market for new-build cargo super-heavies is next to nonexistent, and the cargo carriers seem to prefer legacy airframes with proven problems and maintenance processes.

That really just leaves strategic lift as the only avenue in which the BWB design makes any sense, and it remains to be seen whether the USAF has any interest in outright replacing the C-5's anytime soon. If that indeed happens, I wouldn't be surprised if a civilian variant makes it's way into the commercial cargo market, but that would all depend on whether the USAF wants to get rid of it's shiny new C-5Ms.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Where the BWB design process seems to have been really useful for Boeing is in helping to push the development of wider pressurized spaces with elliptical cross-sections using composite materials.

The BWB is DOA for the passenger market, but some of the technologies needed to make the BWB work should be very useful for Boeings conventional airliner designs. I've read rumors that the 737 replacement will be a two-aisle design with 2-4-2 economy seating for much faster boarding/disembarking cycles. The articles I read indicated that this design features an elliptical fuselage cross section that is wider than it is tall (a little like the early ultra wide A380 concepts), in order to keep the overall height and cross-sections of the aircraft as close to the 737 as possible. If this indeed is the future for Boeing's small planes, then the BWB DNA will be all over this thing's fuselage design.

a reply to: Barnalby

We should develop them for fire control planes as well as those new didrigibles that are heavy lift capable.

a reply to: Barnalby

It's a 757 replacement actually, known as MoM for Middle of Market. Boeing is a long way from a 737 replacement, especially with the Max having just started assembly. They're still in the early days, but an elliptical design is one they're looking at.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Some poster on another website, I believe Aviation week, stated they had witnessed a full scale BWB fuselage heading out from LA area into desert on the truck or something to that effect. They were either in the BWB program or knew of it.

This is a bit off topic, but does anyone have information about the Masonic heirarchy present among the top brass at Lockheed Martin? Is it a requirement that in order to make it onto the top projects and the top of the payroll you have to be a Freemason?

a reply to: Barnalby

Lockheed claims the HBW would haul C-5 cargo sizes or larger with a 70% reduction over the C-17 fuel economy. Apply these #s to the C-5 and you have some serious monetary fuel savings.

Now go ask Fedex and UPS and other cargo haulers how much they want to save in fuel and I think this market could be actually very large.

a reply to: BigTrain

The C-17 was offered to the Civil market and there was zero interest in it. Even if you save money, the required changes to operating areas, and the lack of oversize market and you won't see a huge interest in them. One of the reasons it's taken so long to develop is lack of interest.

a reply to: BigTrain

You'd have a hell of a time fitting something like that on a truck. It would have to be trucked in pieces and assembled somewhere.

a reply to: Zaphod58

I had read somewhere that Southwest was pushing them to go two-aisle for the 737 replacement as well, though I could see them abandoning the 737 altogether and selling the smaller variant of the MOM design to their big 737 buyers, who are all using them as 757 replacements anyways...

Although it would be interesting given the other rumors that international carriers are clamoring for a true 757 replacement, AKA: 787 wings/cockpit on a narrow-body design for low-volume international routes with the potential for insane long distance service. Icelandair is an obvious example of a carrier that's made the 757 work beautifully as a low-volume international flagship, and I'm sure there would be plenty of sales to international carriers like LAN or the asian airlines for trans-hemispheric low volume routes (think Santiago Chicago, Cape Town San Francisco, Osaka Boston).

I say interesting because for that long-range, lower-volume work like the 757 did, a narrowbody design makes a lot more sense in terms of fuel economy, with the smaller cross section creating much less drag, while the relatively longer fuselage allows for smaller, lighter, and lower drag tail surfaces as well. Meanwhile, for the discount domestic and short-haul carriers like Ryanair and Southwest, a wider twin-aisle fuselage makes much more sense because of what it does to your turnaround times. Those planes fly such short routes that the small fuel economy penalty due to the increased drag of a shorter, wider fuselage with comparatively larger control surfaces is irrelevant if that design speeds up turnarounds to the point that they can fit in another flight per airframe per day.

So we could well end up in a bizarro world where if I'm flying from Oklahoma City to Barcelona, I fly my regional connecting flight to O'Hare in an 8-abreast Boeing widebody seating ~150 people in a 2-4-2 arrangement using an elliptical fuselage with minimal underfloor luggage space, only to fly my flight from ORD to Barca in a ~170 seat 6-abreast narrowbody!

a reply to: Zaphod58

And as long as there are surplus 747-400's with millions of miles left in them available for a song (cost of the conversion to -F's included), there will be zero market for any new build heavy cargo aircraft.

Basically all of the civil markets where the BWB COULD make sense are either nonstarters or nonexistant. You'll only see them as bombers (where spanloaders and flying wings with embedded engines have a major stealth advantage) or as strategic airlift vehicles. Considering the relative youth of the C-17 fleet and the recent rebuilds of the C-5's, don't hold your breath.

The only other use I could possibly see would be as a clean-sheet design to replace the KC-10's, but the KC-46's should be doing most of that already, and a KC-777 will likely be significantly cheaper if the USAF wants anything bigger.

a reply to: Barnalby

They aren't even considering a 737 replacement of any sort, single or twin aisle. They have far too many orders left to fill, even before the first Max is partially assembled. They still have over 4,000 aircraft left to deliver, and that's just on the NG line. There are already 2,700 Max orders, which puts them at almost 7,000 aircraft to deliver. There's no way they're going to even consider even looking at putting a replacement on paper with that many aircraft to deliver.

a reply to: Barnalby

There are two more tanker competitions. The KC-46 is only to replace about half the KC-135s at most. They still have to replace the rest of them, and the KC-10s with at least one more white world competition.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Durr, I was thinking about the Y1, and I'd forgotten that Airbus with the A320NEO had more or less checkmated them into sticking with the 737MAX rather than invite the risks of a clean-sheet design, however more competitive it might have been...

Reading now, apparently they weren't confident that they could retool Renton to keep up with the demand.

Though I wish they had the balls to push ahead with the design and try and get ahead of Airbus anyways. Now that the C-17 is out of production, Long Beach would be a perfect place to tool up for a 737 replacement. I doubt that most of the carriers on the 737 waitlist would object too loudly to having their orders switched to a new airframe.

That quick-turnaround dual aisle design would be an utter and absolute game-changer, and would all but ensure that EasyJet and JetBlue would make the switch to Boeing products from their A320s.

The C-17 was offered to the Civil market and there was zero interest in it. Even if you save money, the required changes to operating areas, and the lack of oversize market and you won't see a huge interest in them. One of the reasons it's taken so long to develop is lack of interest.

There is always Antanov

a reply to: Barnalby

I think they'd object to having their orders switched. Even with the long wait times many of them would have their aircraft delivered before a clean sheet design was even close to delivering.

Doesn't 2 aisles just move the jam of people to the door instead of aisle ;-)

That's my experience anyway, it's all the airlines charging extra for hold luggage people bring on so much hand luggage they take forever to get their crap together.

I can get my hold luggage at Sydney as fast as it takes me to walk to the belt and my bag is much smaller than those squashed into the lockers!

Off topic rant over!!

a reply to: Forensick

The big issue is the extra time that it takes to fill seats that are 3 deep from one aisle vs seats that are only 2 deep.

I alternately fly JetBlue and southwest on the same route very frequently, and I'll tell you that firsthand there's a night and day difference between the turnaround times of Jetblue's 4-abrest E-190s and Southwest's 6-abrest 737s. The Southwest planes only seat 50% more than Jetblue's, but they take at least twice as long to board and disembark.

On their short routes (think 50-90 minutes flight time), that 20 or so minutes saved on each turnaround can really add up, to the point that over a day it can lead to 1-2 more revenue flights per airframe. Southwest knows this, which was why they were so gung-ho about twin aisle designs meaning no seat would be more that one seat away from an aisle.