A new silent jet concept from MIT could eventually ease airport noise:
Instead of the tube-and-wing model common today, the Silent Jet is a flying wing, evoking current “stealth” military aircraft. It lacks the central vertical stabilizer common at the tail of current passenger jets, instead using a pair of stabilizers at the wingtips.The proposed plane has a 222-foot (68-metre) wingspan and is 144 feet (44 metres) long from nose to tail, comparable in size to a Boeing 767.
“You take the fuselage and you squish it, and you spread it out, and it’s an all-lifting body,” said Zoltan Spakovsky, an associate professor at MIT who worked on the project.
The design allows the plane to remain in the air at slower speeds, which would allow it to cruise in for a landing more quietly. The plane does not use wing flaps, which are common on today’s passenger jets and create much of the landing noise.
The MIT-Cambridge team also designed what they said could be a quieter and more fuel efficient engine system. Rather than placing the jets in pods suspended under the wings, the silent jet uses three engines built into the middle of the plane, at the rear. They take in air from above the wing, which helps to insulate people on the ground from jet noise at takeoff.