Andy

All major players are locked into a model of tubular fuselages on thin wings propelled by turbofan jet engines to provide lift and forward motion. Manufacturing is flexible and fuselage length can easily be stretched or shrunk to make new models. But the resulting designs need to fly fast and at high altitude for maximum efficiency per passenger mile, and they need vast concrete runways to operate from. All of which consumes fuel and resources, including passenger ground miles to and from out-of-town airports.

This is not the only way to build aircraft, engines or airports, but the huge investment in conventional systems means that no alternative ever gets to become viable because of the high costs of entry compared with conventional gas-guzzling systems. Look at London Heathrow: stupid place to build a major airport, but it’s too expensive to fix so they just keep adding more bits onto it.

Locked-in interests mean that what we’re not seeing any current prospect of is investment into truly fuel-efficient alternatives. For instance: heavy-lifting airships for goods and people that need to travel faster than ships but not at 500 mph; or Ekranoplan-type ultra-large seaplane craft that fly economically in ground effect at very low levels and high speeds, and could operate from seaports without runways. Both have problems, but nothing that seems insoluble.

Virgin owns or owned Lightship, an airship operator, but this is confined to relatively trivial operations involving low-payload aerial camera platforms and flying advertising hoardings at sports events.

Talk of more ambitious military/industrial/transport applications for airships never seems to survive past the occasional demonstration flight.

So Virgin just orders yet more ultra-conventional Airbuses and Boeings while Branson generates hot air about biofuels.