Prospective Futures of Civilian Air Transportation

Abstract

Civilian air transportation is changing rapidly, is undergoing a renaissance with truly major societal and wide-ranging commercial and industrial level implications. This renaissance is enabled by a plethora of advanced to revolutionary technologies including renewable / “green”/ increasingly inexpensive energy, electric propulsion, nanomaterials and materials processing, printing manufacture, artificial intelligence (AI)/autonomy, an emerging global sensor grid, safety/reliability attainment, miniaturization and resilient navigation and communications. The major component of this renaissance is an ongoing shift to essentially emissionless fly/drive aircraft including personal aircraft, the latter flown from the local street, eventually replacing much of ground transportation and scheduled commercial air traffic. Due to the projected tremendous increase in the number of flying vehicles, autonomous vehicle operation and air traffic control will be essential. The buildout of the personal aircraft markets is projected to be the order of $1T/ year. The benefits of such personal air transportation include major reduced costs for roads and bridges and current auto infrastructures, much shortened travel time, the electric propulsion recharged by renewables resulting in major favorable climate, ecosystem and pollution impacts, and autonomous operation proffers the possibility of saving lives. The applications for small/personal class aircraft include an extensive number of service, business, and governmental uses and far longer, easier, faster commute possibilities. Given projected vehicle improvements and a suitable air traffic control (ATC) system, personal air vehicles could replace much of domestic airline service. They can be used for sport, and should be suitable, being autonomous, for use by the aged and the infirm. The emerging competition for this aero renaissance was apparent in the major-to-historic COVID-19 impacts upon air travel. Tele-travel, immersive, virtual presence as an alternative to air travel has long been under development. The technology, especially bandwidth and virtual reality, has been developed to where this alternative to physical travel is now a serious competition for physical travel of all varieties as proven in the COVID 19 impacts. Tele-travel is one aspect of the rapidly developing tele-everything virtual age that we are entering, including tele-work, tele-commuting, tele-education, tele-medicine, tele-shopping, tele-commerce writ large, telepolitics/entertainment/socialization and with onsite printers, tele-manufacturing. The tele-travel benefits include far less cost, major reductions in climate impacts, far less time, minimal time away from family etc., and far more engagement opportunities, efficiency. For long haul air transport at transonic and supersonic speeds, projections include emissionless electrics with increasing ranges recharged or via green fuels produced by the cost reductions of renewable energy. Then there are biofuels, with a potential huge capacity enabled by halophytes, salt plants grown on wastelands using saline, seawater. Also enabling would be doubled aero performance via drag reduction, which could increase achievable range for given battery energy density. In addition, there are advanced nanocomposites and nanoscale metal printing with superb microstructures, which could provide dry weight reductions and additional range increases. Renewable energy is now at or below cost parity with fossil carbon generation with their costs still continuing to fall. Currently renewables are some 95% of new generation capacity and generate now some 28% of electricity worldwide, with projections for 80% generation in two to three decades. The still ongoing cost reductions for both the renewables and energy storage, which dropped some 70% over the last three years, appear to proffer minimal emissions for electric or green fueled aircraft going forward. There are two disparate approaches being pursued for improved materials, stronger, lighter weight, more durable, etc. The first of these is nanotube composites. The second is motivated by observations over the years that the performance of metals is, by factors up to the order of 20, degraded by the dislocations and grain boundary issues produced by various materials processing approaches. The improvement approach for this is printing at the nanoscale, producing much improved microstructure and properties by a factor of 5 with projections Engineered Science