News and Views article<\/a>\u00a0delves into the technical details and the challenges that must be addressed to scale up the prototype plane. Is such a goal achievable? Conventional wisdom would say probably not. But then it also said that aircraft with ion-drive, or electroaerodynamic, engines \u2014 which create thrust by using electrical forces to accelerate ions in a fluid to form an ionic wind \u2014 would never fly at all. The thrust, after all, is produced only by the wind generated by the movement of ionized air molecules as current passes between two electrodes, one thinner than the other.<\/p>\nIonic wind was first identified in the 1960s, but most scientists and aviation professionals since have insisted that the process was never going to be efficient enough to be useful, and left experiments to enthusiasts and hobbyists. Yet, not only do the MIT researchers demonstrate the first flight of an aeroplane propelled in this way, but they also show that the efficiency will increase as the velocity of the aircraft increases, because the electrodes that act as the engine create such little aerodynamic drag.<\/p>\n
The scientists\u2019 success will surely spur on others to re-explore a technology that was long forgotten. This will no doubt include military research, and some of the possible applications \u2014 silent drones and engines with no infrared signal that are thus impossible to detect \u2014 will rightly worry many and should be openly discussed.<\/p>\n
This first flight will stimulate both awe and anxiety \u2014 just as the first powered flight by the Wright brothers did. Will it prove as influential? As you read this, between 6,000 and 12,000 commercial aircraft are airborne, and those are a fraction of the 100,000 or so flights scheduled each day. And every one of these aircraft is sending greenhouse-gas emissions high into Earth\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n
Predictions about the future of flight are dangerous because work can be overtaken by events or exposed as wishful thinking. (Just four years before the aerial carnage of the Second World War,\u00a0Nature\u00a0<\/i>solemnly predicted that the risk of attack from the air was remote. And in the 1970s, it reported claims that a hydrogen-powered aircraft could take to the skies by the end of the twentieth century.)<\/p>\n
When the Wright brothers made their historic flight in December 1903, it didn\u2019t receive that much attention. In part, that was because their idea was just one of several being explored to achieve flight \u2014 with others betting on the success of gliders, airships and even kites. The same is true today. Ion-drive engines are just one much-needed option to improve the efficiency and environmental impact of aircraft engines, alongside tweaks to fuel and design. Let\u2019s hope some of them take off.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_empty_space][vc_single_image image=”608″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n
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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] In February 1904, a short news item in\u00a0Nature\u00a0marked a monumental event. It recorded the achievements of the American brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright and the contraption that they had launched from a hill in North Carolina a couple of months earlier. \u201cThey now appear to have succeeded in raising themselves from the ground by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[171],"tags":[38,40],"class_list":["post-620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aviation","tag-movies","tag-trailer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/psi-gamma.com\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/psi-gamma.com\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/psi-gamma.com\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psi-gamma.com\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psi-gamma.com\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/psi-gamma.com\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1102,"href":"https:\/\/psi-gamma.com\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620\/revisions\/1102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psi-gamma.com\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/psi-gamma.com\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psi-gamma.com\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/psi-gamma.com\/technology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}