“Making our wings longer, leaner and lighter helps our aircraft rely more on flight physics and less on fuel” – so says Airbus . The European planemaker is investing a fortune in its Wing of Tomorrow programme. In the future, you could look out from a window seat to see the end of the wing being lowered as you taxi to the runway, and conversely retracted after touchdown.
“Fold the wings, doors to manual and cross check.”
The problem engineers are trying to solve is this: bringing aircraft technology into the 21st century while remaining compatible with 20th century airport infrastructure. The Airbus A320 is now four decades old. The single-aisle aircraft has been phenomenally successful. The A320 series is the only type that many airlines including easyJet and Wizz Air fly. This month the 12,000th edition of the type will be delivered.
Yet the twin-jet has less-than-optimal wings. The span of 31 metres (101 feet) is simply too short to be efficient. In order to minimise fuel burn, and reduce the impact of flying on the planet, a plane designed to carry around 200 people on flights of up to six or seven hours would have a significantly wider span. The aim: to increase lift and reduce drag.
“Wings play a really important part in our decarbonisation journey by bringing aerodynamic efficiency,” says Sue Partridge. She is head of the Airbus Wing of Tomorrow programme. “The way you make a wing more aerodynamically efficient, the physics tells us, is: you make it long and slender.”
But the airports of today are just not built to accommodate single-aisle aircraft with ultra-wide wings.
“The world today has hundreds of thousands of airport gates, and they’re all a fixed dimension,” says Sue.
“That’s really what drives us to the need to fold the wings. If we put an aircraft into service that has really long wings and then it can’t fit into those airport gates, that’s just not practical.
“We cannot expect the whole world to adapt its airports. We need to develop a product that adapts to the infrastructure that’s there.”
Once in flight, says Sue: “You’ll be able to look out of the window at these long elegant wings, and you’ll be on an aircraft that’s soaring on the air currents like an albatross does, wasting very little energy, burning less fuel.”
The narrow-bodied plane to which these wings are to be fitted will look very different to current aircraft. The twin engines may be “open fan” – with the cowling that wraps around the aircraft removed to improve performance. They may be mounted at the back of the fuselage rather than dangling from each wing.
The folding mechanism will come with a weight penalty. Even allowing for this, Airbus is seeking a 25 per cent increase in efficiency for its A320 replacement.
The company has pushed back its projections for hydrogen-powered passenger planes from the previously announced plan of 2035. The great green future of flying seems as far away as ever.
With pressure growing on airlines to reduce their impact, the need to extract as much efficiency from conventional kerosene-powered aircraft is increasingly urgent.
Airbus is well ahead of beleaguered Boeing in developing a 21st-century narrow-bodied aircraft; the US planemaker’s workhorse 737 is nearing its 60th birthday.
Yet Europe’s folding wing of tomorrow will not be with you by the end of this decade – nor in the early 2030s. Sue Partridge says: “We’re talking about that going into service in the second half of the next decade.”
Listen to Sue Partridge, head of the Airbus Wing of Tomorrow programme, on The Independent daily travel podcast
