It's 7.30am, 19 June 2050. You need to get to work fast for an early meeting and it's busy out there 1,000 ft over London's Hyde Park terraport.
Climbing into your personal solar-powered flying saucer pod - together with thousands of other mid 21st century commuters - you negotiate your way across the city effortlessly, thanks to a pre-registered flight plan that activated as soon as you opened the pneumatic hatch.
There is not the slightest sign of air rage either in this totally automated air traffic system, since humans were taken out of the loop.
You arrive exactly on schedule to board the latest feeder aircraft, which achieves takeoff velocity by accelerating noiselessly down an electromagnetic rail running along Rotten Row.
Parents taking their children to school in family microlights cheer the early morning air display from their Park Lane vantage point.
Your destination is Singapore but first you need to dock in the global omnibus cruiser hovering at 8,000ft above the old Queen Mary Reservoir, and which is busy decanting arriving passengers on parafoils.
Since it launched six months ago the nuclear-powered omnibus will not alight on the earth's surface again until it is taken out of service. Until then it will transport millions of people over great circle routes around the world.
Once on board, you only have one hour of journey time ahead of you, thanks to the latest advances in plasma aerodynamics and you will arrive to be met at 8,000ft by the Changi Express Feeder, which makes the smoothest water landing on the Straits of Malacca.
An impossible vision? Perhaps not. Despite the sharp intake of collective breath that greeted IATA chief Giovanni Bisignani's recent challenge for the world's best aeronautical brains to develop a zero-emissions aircraft within 50 years, some of the scenarios above are not so very absurd.
The Advisory Council for Aeronautical Research in Europe (ACARE), the principal aeronautical think tank responsible for steering European research, doesn't seem to think so either.
Out of the box
Highly conscious of the industrial imperative to answer aviation's critics, the conceptual framework of future flying is receiving some serious thought.
Adriaan de Graaff, who has 32 years of experience with Dutch aeronautical research institute NIVR, has been tasked by ACARE to do just that and has established a blue sky project called Out of the Box (OOTB).
"There has been some concern within the European Commission about the incremental steps that we are achieving in aeronautical research as there are no real big advances or breakthroughs on the horizon," explains de Graaff.
He has since organised a series of workshops designed to produce a community of mind-bending concepts. De Graaff and his team assessed them in terms of business readiness and technical feasibility, and whittled them down to six priority areas, which could feed into future European research.
De Graaff says the industry has been limited to achieving only incremental improvements by short term commercial pressures and a lack of risk culture.
"On the one hand you have a lack of funding and insufficient attention for long term research to provide the opportunities for people to go wild and think up solutions that may appear strange and things that are so experimental they may well fail," he says.
"Universities also complain they have to do near term research because of funding issues, while in industry there is a focus on delivering short term benefits chiefly through shareholder pressures.
Even Europe's latest strategic research policy risks becoming obsolete. "It is obvious even now that we need to set new priorities. Air transport is becoming more and more political, with politicians accusing air transport of becoming potentially one of the worst polluters and the policy framework has to address that," says de Graaff.
"The ACARE goals are pegged at 2020, which in aviation is basically tomorrow. That is the whole idea behind Out of the Box: setting the vision further, at say 2040 or 2050, which identifies innovative, discontinuous, revolutionary and radical ideas."
Open to creativity
"We are looking at concepts, not technology at this point. The workshops have served to show that people are quite open. The level of idea creation gave us so much confidence that we want to continue this over the next few years, with a top-down conceptual approach combined with a bottom-up approach, which gathers together emerging technologies.
"We then want to stimulate the point where they converge through [what is] essentially an ACARE incubator mechanism."
Source: Flight International
