jetliner – Page 4 – Aerospace Projects Review Blog

Aug 212020

Supersonic tanker

Aug 112020

A report I scored off ebay some time back had a number of conceptual Douglas designs for supersonic tanker aircraft. Gotta scan this in at some point…

Twin-Engined Tristar

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Jul 082020

It is common practice for an aerospace company to crank out many and sundry concepts for derivatives of the aircraft they produce (if they didn’t, Aerospace Projects Review never would’ve come to be). This is certainly true for jetliners. And of course, in many cases derivative are in fact produced… the DC-9, 707 and 737, for instance, saw many stretched, stretched further and stretched some more designs enter service, packing more passengers onto airframes that don’t cost much more to buy or operate.

One derivative that went no further than the concept stage was a 1970’s Lockheed idea for a twin-engine version of their three-engined L-1011. This would have been a *smaller* aircraft, but presumably cheaper, more economical to operate as an “airbus” on shorter routes. However, there were already a number of jetliners to fill that role, and with as expensive as the L-1011 turned out to be to maintain and keep flying, this idea basically never had a chance.

Early Boeing jetliner designs

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Jun 142020

A piece of Boeing artwork depicting several early jetliner concepts. The B-47 design heritage is obvious. This piece was on ebay a while back, and while it wasn’t one that I won, I snagged a decently-high rez scan from the listing and have made it available to all $4 and up APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Document Subscribers. it has been uplosded into the June 2020 folder at Dropbox for those subscribers.

If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.

North American Rocket Transport

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Apr 242020

In 1965 North American Aviation produced a study for NASA about reusable space launch vehicles to support forthcoming expected space stations. Included within that study was an alternate use of rocket vehicles… point-to-point hypersonic commercial passenger transportation. This concept goes back to the late 1940’s and has continued to the present day, with the Elon Musk suggesting that the SpaceX Starship could be used for that purpose. The idea is interesting and it certainly *could* work. But could it be commercially cost effective? History with craft such as the Concorde and the Shuttle argue strongly against an early vehicle like this doing anything but losing truckloads of cash every time it launches.

Lockheed Atomic Airliner

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Apr 152020

The heyday of the “atomic powered airplane” was the late 50’s-early 60’s. By the mid ’60’s it was done. But there was a brief, kinda sad and halfhearted revival in the seventies when the price of fuel spiked. An atomic airplane would be able to fly without all that pesky and overpriced petroleum; it could fly without producing pollution; and it could fly really, really far. Whether it could fly without irradiating the passengers, and whether it could fly at all, are questions largely left unanswered. The art below depicts a Lockheed concept for an atomic jetliner. It has the wasp-waisted configuration favored in the ’70’s for transonic jetliner designs, but where the reactor was supposed to go is not clear. *Presumably* it was to be fitted in the fuselage under the wings, as that’s the only place where no passenger windows are visible.

Apr 052020

Once again Patreon seems to be becoming unstable. So I’ve got an alternate: The APR Monthly Historical Documents Program

For some years I have been operating the “Aerospace Projects Review Patreon” which provides monthly rewards in the form of high resolution scans of vintage aerospace diagrams, art and documents. This has worked pretty well, but it seems that perhaps some people might prefer to sign on more directly. Fortunately, PayPal provides the option not only for one-time purchases but also monthly subscriptions. By subscribing using the drop-down menu below, you will receive the same benefits as APR Patrons, but without going through Patreon itself.

A month of aerospace

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Mar 182020

Given the craziness going on, I decided that what the world clearly needs is something consistent. Like, say, me posting one piece of aerospace diagram or art every day for a month or so. So I’m going to do that. But in order to keep people from getting too complacent, I’m posting some of them on this blog, some on the other blog. Why? Because why not, that’s why. I’m slapping the posts together now and scheduling them to show up one at a time, one a day. Given the pandemic… who knows, this little project might well outlive *me.*

So, check back in (on this blog or the other) on a daily basis. Might be something interesting.

Lockheed L-151

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Jul 202019

One of Lockheed’s first designs for a jetliner, 1945’s L-151, was basically a Constellation with the piston engines replaced with two clusters of three turbojets. It was a terribly conservative design, and likely would not have performed very well at all, particularly on range… but it was a start.

Diagram is from US Transport Projects #2.

747: Embiggened

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Apr 282019

As with pretty much all jetliners, the 747 has seen its fuselage stretched (and shortened) to adjust the number of passengers and other payload it can carry. But as stretched as it has been, there were plans for much more extravagant changes. In the early 1970s there were plans in place for not only fuselage stretches by way of inserting lengthening plugs, but also by stretching the upper deck much further aft, turning it into a true double-decker. As the diagram below shows, for shorter routes the passenger count count be bumped up to 1000. keep in ind that this was using 1971-era seating; with modern 21st century passenger-packing technology, who knows haw many human bodies could have been stuffed into these planes, ready to be driven mad by booze, low oxygen, screaming babies and deep vein thrombosis.

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