Unless this has the capacity of a 737-700 / Max-7, there's no way six emergency exits are enough. They're also all up at the front, making egress difficult if an isle is blocked.
Yes, it's a nitpick, but if that's a design flaw that jumps out to a complete amateur with moderate aviation knowledge and no industry experience, it doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence.
This is part of why Boeing shut down the idea back in the 90s iirc.
But I think this company is not actually aiming to develop an airliner at all, it just makes for pretty pictures. Their demonstrator is being built for the USAF (along with Northrop Grumman and Scaled Composites), with a view to being used as a tanker and transport.
I'm sceptical. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Airbus have all investigated this exact concept over the last few decades, and none have gone forward with it.
> Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Airbus have all investigated this exact concept over the last few decades, and none have gone forward with it
Low incentives for taking risks and massive improvements in CAD and computer testing. A new airframe should always bring scepticism. But as someone with aerospace engineering training, it’s somewhat funny to see the space side of the market seeing more competition and thus innovation than the aero.
People made the same arguments about reusable rockets. If there’s one thing that saga taught us it’s that traditional aerospace is incredibly conservative and risk averse. “If it hasn’t already flown it can’t fly.”
Not saying this design is the answer but it’s quite clear that the opinions of the big players about novel ideas are to be taken with a certain amount of salt.
I’m not sure where this mentality came from. My guess would be many boom bust cycles and shifting political winds causing project cancellation. That probably burned people too many times on new projects. Combine that with a safety at any cost mentality and a lack of incentives to innovate.
> I'm sceptical. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Airbus have all investigated this exact concept over the last few decades, and none have gone forward with it.
Airbus has the ZEROe program to look at the future of aviation that is ramping up and should have tech demonstrators flying in the 2030s, exploring all sorts of options like open fan engines, hydrogen(-electric) propulsion, radical designs, etc. One of the concepts is the "Blended-Wing Body".
I'm skeptical too, but part I wouldn't necessarily write it off because a company like Boeing hasn't gone forward with it. Boeing won't even go forward with a redesign of the 737, preferring to go the cheaper route of continually modifying an existing design from the 1960s.
I do think there are other concepts that are farther along and have more promise like the Aurora D8 "double bubble" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_D8). Its design isn't as much of a departure, but it would still reduce fuel burn and noise significantly. Likewise, Boeing's TTBW (transsonic truss braced wing) design is promising especially since they have a full-sized demonstrator at this point.
But companies have been hesitant to invest in new types of aircraft. It's an industry that's essentially a duopoly where the big two have a decade worth of orders for their current aircraft. There isn't even a lot of competition between the two because neither has the capacity to produce more planes if they create something that airlines want. The A380 was probably the biggest risk that's been taken recently and that turned out to be a pretty big failure. I don't think either Boeing or Airbus wants to take risks when they have pretty guaranteed profits by staying the course. Boeing has even shelved its plans for the Boeing NMA (new midsize airplane) to replace the 737.
I'd also add that these projects often end up learning important things about aeronautics even if they don't become things you fly on. For example, one of the big things with the Aurora D8 was figuring out how to deal with boundary layer ingestion inefficiencies. Even if the D8 never becomes something you'll fly on, the knowledge gained there might be used in other planes that you will fly on.
You're right to be skeptical and I am too. It's really difficult to bring a new plane to market. However, I'm not sure I'd take Boeing and Airbus' reticence as evidence that it isn't worth exploring more. We've been talking about the bean counters taking over Boeing for months now and complaining about Boeing continually modifying the 737 rather than creating a new plane. Is it likely we'll be flying on these things? No. Even if it's a good and viable design, there's so much beyond that to get done. Actually manufacturing something as complex as a plane is very hard - there's a reason Airbus and Boeing have a decade long backlog of orders. But there's also a reason why places like NASA want to fund experimental projects like this - because there aren't really incentives for companies like Boeing to take risks on new designs.
I mean, you're right: this probably won't happen. At the same time, I think it's important to keep trying because sometimes these things do work and even when they don't work we often learn important things that can be applied in the future.
This is a valid point, but as a hobbyist pilot, damn that aircraft is beautiful. It may not replace the Boeing, but it would certainly replace a Gulfstream or Pilatus.
Looks like there are other use cases besides passenger jet - freighter and tanker won't need the extra exits.
Also one of the other mockup pictures seems to show multiple possible exits per side. Maybe there are only two regular-use exits at the front, with extra emergency exits on both sides a little further back, but which are not opened during normal operations: https://www.jetzero.aero/hubfs/Z5-0029-cloud-hero-GENX-JetZe...
Looks more like Max10 sized. It looks like there is a small door behind the wing, which matches the location of the back end of the cabin. There’s no window in them, but they are probably depicting the aft emergency exits, given regulatory requirements that exits be on both ends of the cabin. Based on the cut away, I think the large door aft of the main door, that has no window is likely the cargo hold door. It doesn’t look like there’s a hold under the cabin. The main door appears to be extra wide, which improves the exit capacity of the door, and reduces the actual number of exits required. There’s also the option for a ventral exit, but those are pretty rare on passenger airliners.
Does FAA mandate this particular safety feature or is it up to plane manufacturer?
Part of me wants to hire cargo plane, put bunch of bunk beds, call it 'cargo flight experience' and shuffle people between continents for 1/4th the price...
The FAA mandates that exits be distributed "as uniformly as practical" and requires certain numbers and types of exit according to the number of passengers [0] Also, at max capacity all passengers and crew must be able to evacuate in 90 seconds [1].
So, your cargo experience might have regulatory trouble. The "as uniformly as possible" might allow for a blended wing design though, provided you could get everyone out fast enough. There might be some other relevant regulations that I've missed as well.
... I mean, emergency exits are largely a theater of safety, aren't they? Like oxygen masks and the flotation seat cushion?
Also, I'm curious, is CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) modeling still so poor that conceptual designs are still very uncertain when converting to a model or scaled down example?
No they arent. Wtf are you even talking about. We literally just had a crash on an A350 where everybody escaped threw the exit doors before the plane burned down.
Inost crashes most people escape threw the emergency doors.
There is a question how fast is fast enough. But fast escape are incredibly important.
How many lives would that really save? We've improved airline safety to the point that there's only a single major disaster every few years. Consider how few lives extra emergency exits have actually saved in the past decade. I would guess less than 10.
If that is the price we pay for a huge range of other improvements then I think it's worth it.
What an absolute rubbish idea. That's not how it works, at all.
There are so few lives lost thanks to the stringent requirements put in place, like the mandatory 90 second evacuation rule. Remove these requirements, and it's a guarantee that the numbers will go up, sooner rather than later.
Like most of those rules, the evacuation rules were established after a very thorough analysis of previous accidents, painstakingly determining who died where, and from which cause. It is not some number pulled out of thin air that is suddenly irrelevant thanks to "technology".
The MAX saga is a very good reminder of what happens when you start playing loose with those rules. People die. Quickly, and in mass.
And, as "luck" would have it, we are not even 3 months into 2024, and we have already been served the perfect, actual, counter example to this proposal: the JAL flight, where 379 lives where saved thanks to rapid evacuation.
I'll leave a nice little article link from January here. It just happens to have the perfect headline:
There literally was just a plane with 400 people in it that crashed. All of them escaped threw the exits and did so safly and efficently. The plane then burned down.
So literally just in the last few month your argument is wrong.
I feel like I see these kinds of proposed improvements to air travel (e.g. this, improved seat designs, improved volumes, etc), and yet, we're still flying in the same basic design with ever-smaller seat allocations as we have for decades. What are the chances planes like this will actually see the light of day in our lifetimes? It feels like i'm more likely to see fusion become a realistic contributor to the power grid than I am to see air travel change in any noticeable way (for the common flier at least, discounting fares like transoceanic business class).
Airplanes have changed, but in ways not immediately visible.
The Dreamliner is something like 80% composites by volume now, a material profile almost unthinkable 30 years ago.
But the visual dynamics of the design changes have been far less dramatic.
I do think we may see things change significantly with eVTOLs and battery tech improvements.
Major increases in energy density plus solid state (for safety) would probably trigger a Tesla-fication, and at that point the incumbents will inevitably be late adopters and some upstart is going to build something new looking.
Finally, if shape-memory polymers ever really take off, we could see some exciting things. Imagine a dynamically shaping airfoil, or, way out there, a wing which can translate itself from wide body to delta with almost no moving parts required to do so.
> Dreamliner is something like 80% composites by volume now, a material profile almost unthinkable 30 years ago
This—and no bleed air, fly by wire, et cetera—are big. But not on the level of air frame improvements. We’ve been stuck in a local optimum due to overconsolidation for decades now. We’re seeing it bleed into safety simply because complacence evolved into corruption.
Modern airliners are drastically more fuel-efficient than planes like the 707. Fuel efficiency is often what drives a new design. The 757 I worked on came about because of a 35% more efficient engine design. The MAX came about because (drum roll) 15% more fuel efficient engines. These make for enormous operational cost savings.
And yet Boeing has yet to backport all that fancy carbon fiber and stuff to their bread and butter 737…
Just because a 737 is used for shorter flights doesn’t mean people wouldn’t want higher air pressure, higher humidity, larger windows, quieter cabins, etc…
So disappointing they keep cranking out the current 737 lineage.
The airframe designers don't decide the seat space per passenger.
They can include all of the spacious reclining seats and lounge sofas as they want in the design, and airlines will spec it with seats and seat pitches that produce the greatest profit per flight by maximizing the number of passengers within the limits of safety regulations.
This is a multifaceted issue, involving the duopoly of commercial airline manufacturers, strict regulation, and massive subsidies.
It costs Boeing 10s of billions of dollars and usually around a decade to design an aircraft from a clean sheet, with very little incentive for truly disruptive innovation. Developing and testing a wholly new design like this would probably take double the time and more than double the cost. When your assembly, all testing, designs, control systems, and pilots have been optimized "wings on a tube" shape for 70+ years, I'd imagine it's difficult to pivot the core design that drastically.
I'm hoping to see some of the government subsidies shifted towards more competition with Boeing's recent failures, but lobbying is powerful, so we'll see.
I don’t think you’re likely to see a significant change to the flying experience (at least not for the better) as long as most customers continue to prefer the cheapest, most terrible option.
Maybe somebody succeeds with a delta-wing design, but the highest-profit configuration will still be to make the seats as cheap and terrible as possible.
There is a demand for more luxurious aircraft travel, but at the moment it's too costly to provide.
If BWBs become a thing, maybe the value of cabin space will decrease to the point where paying for a business class - or even premium economy - seat for long-haul travel is attractive for more people.
I did some Googling and apparently the base price ratio for business class to economy class is about 3.6 to 1. Some of that is all the other frippery - lounge access, priority baggage, better food, more personal service etc. etc. So at a rough guess providing just the bigger seat would attract a premium of maybe 3x economy class.
At the moment, New York-London with United is about $600 and business maybe $1800-$2000 (so perhaps a little bit under the expected premium, but in the ballpark). For most people, an extra $1400 is a big ask.
But imagine a world where the economy flight is $200 and business class $700. I suspect a lot more people would choose business class in those circumstances.
I agree. I am disappointed that NASA abdigated its role in driving forward not only space but aviation to commercial interests. It made, and still makes, many people very rich, but profit motives lead to the masses to feeling, and being handled, like cattle.
I'm particularly frustrated by the dearth of general aviation as a means of travel outside of the wealthy. We built small airports EVERYWHERE, and in most cases they sit rotting in rural areas instead of being hubs of inter-city trade.
I have plans to change that, but the aviation space is notoriously coin-operated and high impedance. Even with funding it's going to require some serious SV-style hacking to change anything meaningfully.
This specific model of BWB, when overlayed with a 737/A320 seems to put the outer-most passengers at the approximate location of the nacelles on the narrow-body aircraft.
The nacelles on a 737 are BARELY wider than an A380. Is differential force an issue on the A380? It is one of the only models of commercial aircraft I have never flown on.
To me the allure of the window seat has less to do with the window and more to do with what the window implies. I.e. it could just as well be called "the wall seat" and I'd get 95% the utility out of it.
Wasn't there some concept in airplane interior design to put displays in the walls so you could virtually display the outside like the aircraft wasn't even there?
Never really thought about how being far from the centerline would change how much/quickly you move in a roll, I can definitely see that feeling being unnerving, expecially the inevetable(though rare?) negative G moments.
Airliners have steadily gotten more fuel efficient at a rate of about 1.3% per year since the 1960s, driven by fierce competition.
If someone could produce a massively more efficient design then there’d be huge interest but when the risk of failure is so high, why would manufacturers take a chance instead of iterating on what is already proven?
In undergrad we had an alumni, who had climbed the ranks at Bombardier, come and talk about aircraft and engine evolution. They are 100% trying to make them as cost-effective as possible and fuel economy is a huge driver for that.
The challenge is that not only is there a huge upfront investment into a new unconventional airframe, with the associated risk of failure that you point out, but if you are successful you're now going to be completely retooling and retraining everyone since no one has experience mass producing airframes like this. For that kind of investment... you'd better have a pretty damned good cost or efficiency argument.
Apparently a 747 has a cruise L/D of around 17 and an A340 is around 19. The U-2 is up around 25. There's not a whole room left between what we've got now and gliders as far as L/D goes, so the only place really left to try to improve is the engines themselves... and modern high-bypass turbofans are really marvels of squeezing as much energy as you can out of a (relatively) lightweight piece of machinery. We build the hot bits in those engines out of, literally, magical single crystals of crazy alloys to be able run them as hot as possible to maximize their efficiency.
JetZero’s four-year development plan is due to culminate in flight tests of the full-scale demonstrator beginning in the first quarter of 2027. Sized around the capacity of a Boeing 767 with a wingspan close to that of an Airbus A330, the demonstrator will be built and tested in collaboration with Northrop Grumman and its prototyping subsidiary Scaled Composites.
It's an ambitious plan though, given that they have only just been granted licenses for their 1:8 scale model.
Readit News
Yes, it's a nitpick, but if that's a design flaw that jumps out to a complete amateur with moderate aviation knowledge and no industry experience, it doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence.
But I think this company is not actually aiming to develop an airliner at all, it just makes for pretty pictures. Their demonstrator is being built for the USAF (along with Northrop Grumman and Scaled Composites), with a view to being used as a tanker and transport.
I'm sceptical. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Airbus have all investigated this exact concept over the last few decades, and none have gone forward with it.
Low incentives for taking risks and massive improvements in CAD and computer testing. A new airframe should always bring scepticism. But as someone with aerospace engineering training, it’s somewhat funny to see the space side of the market seeing more competition and thus innovation than the aero.
Not saying this design is the answer but it’s quite clear that the opinions of the big players about novel ideas are to be taken with a certain amount of salt.
I’m not sure where this mentality came from. My guess would be many boom bust cycles and shifting political winds causing project cancellation. That probably burned people too many times on new projects. Combine that with a safety at any cost mentality and a lack of incentives to innovate.
Airbus has the ZEROe program to look at the future of aviation that is ramping up and should have tech demonstrators flying in the 2030s, exploring all sorts of options like open fan engines, hydrogen(-electric) propulsion, radical designs, etc. One of the concepts is the "Blended-Wing Body".
I do think there are other concepts that are farther along and have more promise like the Aurora D8 "double bubble" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_D8). Its design isn't as much of a departure, but it would still reduce fuel burn and noise significantly. Likewise, Boeing's TTBW (transsonic truss braced wing) design is promising especially since they have a full-sized demonstrator at this point.
But companies have been hesitant to invest in new types of aircraft. It's an industry that's essentially a duopoly where the big two have a decade worth of orders for their current aircraft. There isn't even a lot of competition between the two because neither has the capacity to produce more planes if they create something that airlines want. The A380 was probably the biggest risk that's been taken recently and that turned out to be a pretty big failure. I don't think either Boeing or Airbus wants to take risks when they have pretty guaranteed profits by staying the course. Boeing has even shelved its plans for the Boeing NMA (new midsize airplane) to replace the 737.
I'd also add that these projects often end up learning important things about aeronautics even if they don't become things you fly on. For example, one of the big things with the Aurora D8 was figuring out how to deal with boundary layer ingestion inefficiencies. Even if the D8 never becomes something you'll fly on, the knowledge gained there might be used in other planes that you will fly on.
You're right to be skeptical and I am too. It's really difficult to bring a new plane to market. However, I'm not sure I'd take Boeing and Airbus' reticence as evidence that it isn't worth exploring more. We've been talking about the bean counters taking over Boeing for months now and complaining about Boeing continually modifying the 737 rather than creating a new plane. Is it likely we'll be flying on these things? No. Even if it's a good and viable design, there's so much beyond that to get done. Actually manufacturing something as complex as a plane is very hard - there's a reason Airbus and Boeing have a decade long backlog of orders. But there's also a reason why places like NASA want to fund experimental projects like this - because there aren't really incentives for companies like Boeing to take risks on new designs.
I mean, you're right: this probably won't happen. At the same time, I think it's important to keep trying because sometimes these things do work and even when they don't work we often learn important things that can be applied in the future.
Also one of the other mockup pictures seems to show multiple possible exits per side. Maybe there are only two regular-use exits at the front, with extra emergency exits on both sides a little further back, but which are not opened during normal operations: https://www.jetzero.aero/hubfs/Z5-0029-cloud-hero-GENX-JetZe...
Looks more like Max10 sized. It looks like there is a small door behind the wing, which matches the location of the back end of the cabin. There’s no window in them, but they are probably depicting the aft emergency exits, given regulatory requirements that exits be on both ends of the cabin. Based on the cut away, I think the large door aft of the main door, that has no window is likely the cargo hold door. It doesn’t look like there’s a hold under the cabin. The main door appears to be extra wide, which improves the exit capacity of the door, and reduces the actual number of exits required. There’s also the option for a ventral exit, but those are pretty rare on passenger airliners.
Part of me wants to hire cargo plane, put bunch of bunk beds, call it 'cargo flight experience' and shuffle people between continents for 1/4th the price...
So, your cargo experience might have regulatory trouble. The "as uniformly as possible" might allow for a blended wing design though, provided you could get everyone out fast enough. There might be some other relevant regulations that I've missed as well.
[0] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.807
[1] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.803
Deleted Comment
Also, I'm curious, is CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) modeling still so poor that conceptual designs are still very uncertain when converting to a model or scaled down example?
Inost crashes most people escape threw the emergency doors.
There is a question how fast is fast enough. But fast escape are incredibly important.
If that is the price we pay for a huge range of other improvements then I think it's worth it.
There are so few lives lost thanks to the stringent requirements put in place, like the mandatory 90 second evacuation rule. Remove these requirements, and it's a guarantee that the numbers will go up, sooner rather than later.
Like most of those rules, the evacuation rules were established after a very thorough analysis of previous accidents, painstakingly determining who died where, and from which cause. It is not some number pulled out of thin air that is suddenly irrelevant thanks to "technology".
The MAX saga is a very good reminder of what happens when you start playing loose with those rules. People die. Quickly, and in mass.
And, as "luck" would have it, we are not even 3 months into 2024, and we have already been served the perfect, actual, counter example to this proposal: the JAL flight, where 379 lives where saved thanks to rapid evacuation.
I'll leave a nice little article link from January here. It just happens to have the perfect headline:
https://apnews.com/article/japan-plane-fire-safety-jal-tokyo...
So literally just in the last few month your argument is wrong.
The Dreamliner is something like 80% composites by volume now, a material profile almost unthinkable 30 years ago.
But the visual dynamics of the design changes have been far less dramatic.
I do think we may see things change significantly with eVTOLs and battery tech improvements.
Major increases in energy density plus solid state (for safety) would probably trigger a Tesla-fication, and at that point the incumbents will inevitably be late adopters and some upstart is going to build something new looking.
Finally, if shape-memory polymers ever really take off, we could see some exciting things. Imagine a dynamically shaping airfoil, or, way out there, a wing which can translate itself from wide body to delta with almost no moving parts required to do so.
This—and no bleed air, fly by wire, et cetera—are big. But not on the level of air frame improvements. We’ve been stuck in a local optimum due to overconsolidation for decades now. We’re seeing it bleed into safety simply because complacence evolved into corruption.
Just because a 737 is used for shorter flights doesn’t mean people wouldn’t want higher air pressure, higher humidity, larger windows, quieter cabins, etc…
So disappointing they keep cranking out the current 737 lineage.
We have a rent-seeking duopoly of airframe designers. The history of commercial air frames ended in the era of the Concorde.
What we need is competition, and national leadership willing to bet on it.
They can include all of the spacious reclining seats and lounge sofas as they want in the design, and airlines will spec it with seats and seat pitches that produce the greatest profit per flight by maximizing the number of passengers within the limits of safety regulations.
It costs Boeing 10s of billions of dollars and usually around a decade to design an aircraft from a clean sheet, with very little incentive for truly disruptive innovation. Developing and testing a wholly new design like this would probably take double the time and more than double the cost. When your assembly, all testing, designs, control systems, and pilots have been optimized "wings on a tube" shape for 70+ years, I'd imagine it's difficult to pivot the core design that drastically.
I'm hoping to see some of the government subsidies shifted towards more competition with Boeing's recent failures, but lobbying is powerful, so we'll see.
Maybe somebody succeeds with a delta-wing design, but the highest-profit configuration will still be to make the seats as cheap and terrible as possible.
If BWBs become a thing, maybe the value of cabin space will decrease to the point where paying for a business class - or even premium economy - seat for long-haul travel is attractive for more people.
I did some Googling and apparently the base price ratio for business class to economy class is about 3.6 to 1. Some of that is all the other frippery - lounge access, priority baggage, better food, more personal service etc. etc. So at a rough guess providing just the bigger seat would attract a premium of maybe 3x economy class.
At the moment, New York-London with United is about $600 and business maybe $1800-$2000 (so perhaps a little bit under the expected premium, but in the ballpark). For most people, an extra $1400 is a big ask.
But imagine a world where the economy flight is $200 and business class $700. I suspect a lot more people would choose business class in those circumstances.
I'm particularly frustrated by the dearth of general aviation as a means of travel outside of the wealthy. We built small airports EVERYWHERE, and in most cases they sit rotting in rural areas instead of being hubs of inter-city trade.
I have plans to change that, but the aviation space is notoriously coin-operated and high impedance. Even with funding it's going to require some serious SV-style hacking to change anything meaningfully.
* Low ratio of window seats may not be acceptable to passengers
* Passengers seated at the edges will experience greater positive and negative g-forces when rolling
* Don't fit well into existing airports for parking, jet bridges, etc.
* More difficult to design for pressurization than a tube
The nacelles on a 737 are BARELY wider than an A380. Is differential force an issue on the A380? It is one of the only models of commercial aircraft I have never flown on.
Is that really a problem though? A lot of window passengers seem to close the window almost as soon as they get in their seat.
Right now it makes sense to fly old planes even when they're less efficient since fuel is cheap.
Airliners have steadily gotten more fuel efficient at a rate of about 1.3% per year since the 1960s, driven by fierce competition.
If someone could produce a massively more efficient design then there’d be huge interest but when the risk of failure is so high, why would manufacturers take a chance instead of iterating on what is already proven?
The challenge is that not only is there a huge upfront investment into a new unconventional airframe, with the associated risk of failure that you point out, but if you are successful you're now going to be completely retooling and retraining everyone since no one has experience mass producing airframes like this. For that kind of investment... you'd better have a pretty damned good cost or efficiency argument.
Apparently a 747 has a cruise L/D of around 17 and an A340 is around 19. The U-2 is up around 25. There's not a whole room left between what we've got now and gliders as far as L/D goes, so the only place really left to try to improve is the engines themselves... and modern high-bypass turbofans are really marvels of squeezing as much energy as you can out of a (relatively) lightweight piece of machinery. We build the hot bits in those engines out of, literally, magical single crystals of crazy alloys to be able run them as hot as possible to maximize their efficiency.
2019: https://www.flightglobal.com/programmes/flying-v-concept-rec...
2020: https://www.businessinsider.com/klm-royal-dutch-airlines-fut...
A prototype of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines' futuristic-looking flying-wing aircraft just took its first flight in Germany — take a look at the Flying-V
That one was closer to a V-shape while this contender fills up the space between the V's legs with more seating.
May the best one win...
http://www.wingco.com/index.html
Looking at the site, this is 20 years ago now since the last update, a taxi test accident appears to have ended the project.
JetZero’s four-year development plan is due to culminate in flight tests of the full-scale demonstrator beginning in the first quarter of 2027. Sized around the capacity of a Boeing 767 with a wingspan close to that of an Airbus A330, the demonstrator will be built and tested in collaboration with Northrop Grumman and its prototyping subsidiary Scaled Composites.
It's an ambitious plan though, given that they have only just been granted licenses for their 1:8 scale model.
Deleted Comment
Absolutely no way -- they'll find a way to fill it as tight as possible.
RyanAir would.
Air Emirates would figure out how to cram a discotech into the back.