Boy would I love to see the skies of the future filled with silhouettes of these things.
One question though, where the f*** are all the windows? How scary would that be to sit in a wide living room that gives you the sense of motion, but you can't see anything moving? Yikes.
On Blended Wing
On
2006-11-06
4
comments
4 comments:
You mean YOU don't normally sit in your livingroom and get the sense that the world is spinning horribly out of control around you?
Weird.
cpm stop drinking Kyro's "special" tea and the spinning will go away.
Personally, I think being on a plane gives you less of a sense that you are actually moving that being in one's living room *grin*
With the top ten airlines having a combined fleet of 5000 passenger jets, the extra capital cost to replace them versus regular planes is estimated at $US 100 billion. With a 30 year amortization at 5.5% the cost of 567 million per month (7 billion per year) will only increase ticket costs by an average of $US 12 per passenger per flight. This excludes development costs, which could add as little a 2 dollars per flight.
With passengers routinely paying 25 dollars of taxes per flight, this seems pretty reasonable.
Of course they'll sell all the obsolete planes to 3rd world countries with undetermined capacity to safely maintain the aging vessels.
And a switchover to rigid lighter-than-air passenger service would save customers 111 dollars per flight.
So silent option 'P' actually costs $125 more per flight than silent option 'Z'.
I leave it to personal taste whether a rounded plane looks cooler than a zeppelin, and whether a $600 dollar direct flight from Saskatoon to New York at 19 hours would be better or worse than a 7 hour connecting jet flight that costs $1500. Personally, I'd catch an 8 hour nap and then use the other 4 extra hours to plan how I was going to spend that $900 dollars at Saks 5th Avenue.
Oh well. As long as I'm dreaming, maybe the new planes will be programmed (silently) not to fly into buildings.
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