End of an ERA_Part 1 

The description of success is spot on. I remember John Denver say it took him almost 20 years to be an overnight success.

Thank you for continuing coverage of NASA's aviation work. Love to see and hear about HWB progress. I hope to see such a design at Oshkosh sometime soon...

This is the most amazing "Erector Set" I've ever seen. Hats off to those boys.

How ingenious! Talk about innovative! I'd like to hangout with the people at Flexsys! I remember seeing the Wright flyer with the wing warping feature and thought the concept was way off base. How wrong was i. Great video! Go Flexsys. Hoping for an update at sometime.

"just barely" that Guppy could have held 1/2 dozen of those

Take a look at the vertical take off from a NON sandy platform at the beginning and contrast that with the take off from the Moon video on a very dusty surface and also remember the cleanliness of the feet of the Lunar Landing craft. Seems every grin of dust/sand on the lunar surface was held together with cement.

3:13 THAT is a cool-ass shot!

that's a pretty cool intro animation Pally

One big problem with the morphing flaps is that without a gap between the main wing and the flap, airflow over the top of the flap is reduced and increases the chance of stalling. You can very clearly see this at 22:55, the air over the flap is going backwards, loosing lift, and creating an unsafe condition.

Would you please compare and contrast the Flexsys wing with the Mission Adaptive Wing (MAW) that came before it? Thanks!

I kept seeing the udf engines, i was hoping that they would explain why they never got put to use??? They were very cutting edge and fuel efficient

Just curious. At 22:55 the airflow over the upper surface of the flap appears completely stalled, with the ribbons fluttering in the wrong direction. That must be generating a huge amount of drag. I guess that's to demonstrate the flaps are strong enough to withstand an over-speed situation?

Vary Interesting and Informative, Big Thank You to All Envolved......

I think the Super Guppy is gorgeous.

I love the "flying wing" design. I wonder why it's necessary to punch holes in the frame for windows, when it would be far easier to feed the images outside the aircraft from tiny camera's mounted on the tail, pointy end, and the left and right sides. Thin screens mounted on the interior of the passenger compartment where windows would be can display those camera images. Result less drag from window frames, less cost, as well as a stronger fuselage without punching large holes along the sides as with conventional windows.

Alllll that engineering for a upward hit! They could have paid me to strike upwards with a damn hammer !!!’

Wish you would use the term "wing warping" for the old efforts

Engineered flexible spines which keeps discrete positions inside according to the algorithm and allows the skin to follow a contour. This is all just an evolution process, for example the basic concept was used back in the early 1960's by McDonnell Douglas in the Bent Up Trailing Edge articulating doors when flaps were extended, which followed a very smooth curve like you see here, but it used slide rule designed pivot and support points with cams and guides and flexible seals. We also have morphing winglets before this. Some mechanically actuated like this, but also some thermally expansive dissimilar sheets. This is also useful for active load control, not discussed here. My associate at Phantomworks has been working on the BWB / HWB for decades on behalf of Boeing.

After control surfaces utilize the principle that Flexsys pioneers now, the next step will be wings with adjustable section profiles, further enhancing efficiency depending on speed and AoA.

Nice!

Awesome!!!

They could have asked Airbus to realize the transport. I guess the successor of the Super-Guppy the Super-Transporter is significant saver and faster.

Great video and we fully subscribe to NASA's goals here- improving general aviation efficiency and safety. A nitpick- I have heard the word for fiber composite creation as "pultruded" ( the opposite direction technique of forming products linearly inside a shaped die as in extruded) or is it really 'Proltruded' as at minute 7:52 ?

Uhhh...that's all great but where's my anti-gravity belt?! And my personal warp-drive spacecraft? I'm waaaiting!

Why not build a test xplane using the same composites as the 787. Surely the radical design shape not offer much the same improvement without testing a brand new material

Most great discoveries are not announced by "Heureka!" but rather by "That's funny. Wait a minute, why does it do that?". I wouldn't be surprised if Archimedes hadn't just been annoyed by his bathtub making a mess on the floor, wondering why it was doing that... ;-)

Very informative. Off the topic, why is the 757 at 12:19 taking off with slat asymetry? Anybody know of this flight?

Moooon landing

What is the name of the music at the end? Thank you in advance

Ok, after watching this, it is freaking AWESOME!!! to know that the Super Guppy is still flying :D

17:45 you're also ignoring that the Wright brothers held that patent and were the patent trolls of the day

9:41. looks like an alien queen! DON'T LET IT EAT RIPLEY!

Can someone tell me what's that object in 18:05?

Wing Body aircraft has been in work since the mid 1930's.

787 was not the first all composite aircraft built.

How do these composite in carbon pieces deal with lightning strikes?

EDITING EDITING EDITING!!!!

I love that your "footage of early aircraft" at 07:00 was a modern video of still flying aircraft taken at The Shuttleworth Collection, Old Warden airfield in the UK in the last few years but turned black & white. :-) There was really no need to do that.

4:30 Lol if you reduce drag by 8℅ and weight by 10℅ it already ads up to fuel consumption reduction of 18% 😁😁😁

Umm, I like 2X a whole lot better than 1.5X, especially since it inevitably goes down over time until it goes 1X too many.

im going to design an aircraft like no other.

Will all the study data be available to the general public?

Incremental improvements to modern commercial jets have only resulted in incremental boosts in fuel efficiency. Speed has flat if not dropped. Only composite materials and the eureka geared turbofan design has boosted efficiency. What new plane design or engines changes has even been shown in beta form. No supersonic releases. Modern fighter jets are just stealthier, same rough design as those since the F16

Concept of ultra efficient low carbon emitting aircraft jet engine: Today's jet engines are efficient with one sizable exception: taking off. For short-haul flights, 80% of the trip fuel is needed for takeoff and getting up to cruise speed. If we could come up with some other way to provide that initial burst of extreme energy to take off and get up to cruise speed, the trip would require but a fraction of the jet fuel that today's jet aircraft use. What we need is an energy storage medium optimized for gigawatt seconds of energy over a period of several minutes. Well, we have such a device, the super capacitor. Keep in mind that, once we've reduced the amount of jet fuel we need, we've gained some leeway in what we can do with the space and weight. Super capacitors and electric motors? Could an electric motor be utilized to run the compressor of the jet engine? All I'm saying is the concept deserves study.

Lifting body or Blended Body Aircraft is realy an old idea. It's been around for some 50 years. I believe Patents were taken out, but , just like the flying wing has some history going back to end of WW 11, for Political reasons it was't chosen to be built. The B-29 was given the contract. Same story here, Berneulli flying AirBody proved it could lift heavier PayLoads with smaller wings. Back in the 1950's.

'New technology winglets and ailerons' ... I had those on my paper darts 60 years ago. Shame I didn't take out a patent!

so my question to you now is it's kind of ambiguous is NASAx a part of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration?

File footage of train was not of an American train.

It's just a piece of fabric covering the gaps!

Why didn't boeing offer the 747LCF

Go boeing call the blend wing the 807

Flying does not need to be safer. It needs to become enjoyable again.

Oi nasa! I think you are still not considering VTOL! Engineers want to save space and save extra plot of soil grid.

Nasa could have used the large Ukranian cargo plane or airbus cargo jet

can you make a hybrid jet use turboshaft engine to power a genarator that drives a internal electric ducted fan and use the jet thrust as well for propulsion

at 13:55 , that doesn't make too much cense. Why all of that was built just to simulate a hit from the "bottom", whereas in the real world, that very same hit could come from anything from the nature, with no special calculations, shapes, consistence, color, weight, angle , power etc. !!!!!?!???? Just get random teeagers to hit the bottom of that metal with anything in their hands!!!

We need a new kind of engine

So, I guess you didn't think of simply inverting the keel to allow the vertical drop to work? Hmmm? More fun to make something complex.

why not just turn the box upside down, then do your weighted drop test as normal?

Draw medic improvements...

how the hell do you only have 3 subscribers?!? well, I'll do my part and increase your subscriber Base by 25%!