It would be easy to dismiss the ideas of Spanish designer Oscar Vinals as futuristic sci-fi nonsense. After all, his airliner designs are pretty wacky compared with what’s flying right now. His latest design, the AWWA-QG ‘Progress Eagle’ is no exception.
But perhaps that misses the point. It takes someone outside the normal design process to visualise what could be possible a decade or more in the future. And the work of Vinals goes much further than merely nice illustrations. He’s an industrial designer and has a handle on manufacturing processes and what’s being developed.
The Progress Eagle concept has two aims: to better the physical characteristics of the commercial airliner and reduce its environmental impact. To do this, Progress Eagle uses advanced 21st century technologies including:
- Smart and Self-Repairing wings made of carbon nanotube and carbon fibres, with a hollow endoskeleton in an ultra-lightweight beehive-shaped made of titanium and graphene. The graphene material is a micro-supercapacitor, fast electrical storage that can charge and discharge a hundred to a thousand times faster than standard batteries. This would provide power for the electric engines.
- Triple Winglets, an evolution of double winglets some airliners are using now. Progress Eagle has two winglets on top of the wingtip (using both blended and elliptical winglet) and one ventral. The Triple Winglets reduce substantially the drag and give more lift for less thrust.
- Wing Geometry is similar to a double arrow structure with a wing root (where the wing joins the fuselage) of a special design. This redirects air flow to generate electricity with a Nano-Kinetic System. It also powers a rear Wind Generator, a CO2 system cleaner and a Hydrogen system generator.
- Six hybrid engines: Vinals suggests Progress Eagle would have electric superconductive engines with the same thrust as jet engines. It would have six engines with one being a mixed wind generator/electric engine. The aircraft could generate all the necessary energy to feed its superconductive engines although it would need Hydrogen fuel to start and in specific moments in flight.
- Hybrid solar cells in the airliner’s ceiling with hexagonal pattern inside a glass structure to give passengers amazing views.
Vinals envisages Progress Eagle having three decks and a capacity of 800 passengers. The pilots have a separate cockpit on the second deck giving the pilots an all-encompassing view around the aircraft – needed particularly when taxying such a big aircraft on the ground. Vinals suggests the 96-metre wide wings could have a folding section to avoid the need to redesign airports to accommodate the aircraft.
So when could such an aircraft be built? Vinals says the technologies used are all in development in some way right now but that it would take another 15 years for them to mature. 2030 then!
