at.future

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The year is 2060 and air travel has made a tremendous change since 2022.

The day has come when you can have a virtual meeting with your colleagues while on a flight to Nobu for your vacation. You do not have to worry about going through TSA and standing in line for hours at the airport anymore due to pre-arrival checks. The speed of an average passenger flight is touching supersonic speeds which gets passengers to their designated destinations in as little as 45 minutes instead of 2 hours. Nowadays everything is focused on improving technology to make it mind blowing and drastically better than last years’ version. There have been recent interviews with senior citizens in the United States asking them did they ever think any of this impressive air travel technology would happen back when they were younger. Many of them alluded to the fact that the world must keep improving and that it was inevitable to get to this point. These answers from citizens mention a remarkably interesting topic, what were the steps that allowed us to get to this point in air travel?

The Beginning

It all began in 2030 when the Lufthansa Group directed its focus towards innovation, by implementing sharkskin technology, a new sustainable engineering on its cargo’s flights, to reduce friction air and fuel consumption. This technology alone reduced CO2 emissions by 80%. Once this major step into the future of air travel was made many other companies around the world began to implement ways to not only upgrade the technology of aircraft but also search for sustainable fuel to help stop the deterioration of the planet. This study led to the development of fuel that can now be made from biogenic feedstocks (waste cooking oil, agricultural residues, municipal waste, power-to-liquid technologies/recycled CO2). This was a breakthrough discovery since finding sustainable fuels like these have been studied since the early 1900s and they were just now coming to fruition. Not only is the fuel highly sustainable but it also helps with supplying cleaner fuel to aircrafts that can reach up to supersonic speeds.

Aircrafts reaching supersonic speeds is nothing new since it was first achieved in 1947 with a US military prototype Bell X-1 aircraft. However, the only planes that were able to achieve this speed were usually military aircraft. Now, in 2060, almost every commercial passenger flight is operating at supersonic speeds. Although for a lesser price people can choose a plane that does not operate at supersonic speed if they want. The technology that made this possible for larger passenger planes was the cutting edge design that NASA unveiled in 2020 by the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works team. This was an aircraft that flew faster than the speed of sound and had a silencer to reduce the sound of the sonic boom to a mere whimper it created while piercing through the skies. In the 1960s many other companies started working on their own commercial supersonic aircraft, but a ban was issued since the sonic boom these flights created was far too much. But this creation by the Skunk Works team paved the way for a new era of supersonic aircraft. Now, anytime you look to the skies you can see planes piercing. through the skies at speeds unimaginable.

More advancements come with high speeds...

There have been many other technological enhancements to air travel other than its cutting edge designs and sustainable fuels. There are also enhancements to improve passenger/customer experiences and pilot usability. For example, there is now more passenger space on commercial flights due to double decker seats that were designed  by Alejandro Núñez Vicente in 2020. These seats were first implemented in 2031 to allow passengers to have more legroom and overall personal space instead of being cramped up for longer flights. Virtual Reality systems were also installed on many flights to give passengers some entertainment that took them out of the reality of sitting on a plane. Pilots have also had updates to their field with augmented cabins and updated autopilot features that even have a fail-safe autopilot, which in my opinion makes their jobs quite simple. However, like the seniors stated in their interviews, the world will always try to improve regardless of how advanced it gets. That is why companies are looking for the breakthrough for our now supersonic planes to reach hypersonic speeds comfortably in the future.

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