AIAA’s SciTech Forum Teases Hydrogen Cycles And Gulled Wings
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College students qualify for free digital subscriptions to Aviation Week and Space Technology. That includes access to our archive, a valuable resource that contains every issue back to 1916. To sign up, go to aviationweek.com slash student. Hello and welcome to Aviation Week's Check 6 podcast for this week. I'm Graham Warwick. I'm the executive editor for technology at Aviation Week, and I am joined by my esteemed colleague Guy Norris, senior editor.

Last week we were both in Orlando for the annual AIAA American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics SciTech Forum. Now this for Guy and I is a big event. Every year it kicks off our year and it's the sort of premier gathering of aerospace technologists. So we get our notebooks full of stuff that we are then sort of raring to write about as the year goes through and we

It's a great event. They know us well and we know them well. And this year particularly was a very large event and appears to be a very successful event. And we actually will have a chat with the new CEO of AIAA, Clay Mowry, later in this podcast about the event and the organization's plans. Meanwhile, I am going to hand over to Guy, who's going to paint us a picture of this year's event.

Thanks, Graham. Yes. And as you rightly say, you know, it's a broad brush, sort of a shop window, really, for what to expect for the year in terms of technology. And, you know, this time was no exception. I mean, I know you've got some, you had some really interesting sessions that you went to, just to give you a flavor of what I saw, you know, one of the things, of course, was

updates on hypersonics from across the board. And it was interesting this time because I think what we really saw was a lot more emphasis on hard science breakthrough, sort of basic fundamental research again, but also the development of a lot of actual demonstrators. So following in really the footsteps, I suppose, or the wake of the strategists

Strata Launch Talon, which we think made a successful debut last year. There's a lot of the emergence of a lot of these things. For example, Lockheed Martin Australia is working with Australian universities basically on a common sort of test vehicle that can

be used to that experimenters can try sort of various experiments with um at over mark five there's uh and then of course the other thing that i found fascinating was the re-emergence really of a

nuclear propulsion for space is a relatively... It's coming back into the discussion with the NASA DARPA Draco program. There was some talk about that, but this was much more sort of assuming that that was going to get on the road and actually begin to show some positive developments and what could come next, you know. And people will be basically kind of excited about the fact that finally after...

60, 70 years, this is potentially a real thing. But what was really interesting to me anyway, was that there was a discussion about use of nuclear power in the atmosphere for atmospheric propulsion. And, you know, I can see you laughing. I know I can hear everybody laughing. But, you know, with the potential for small fusion operations,

This is something that, of course, Lockheed came out with 10 years ago when we broke the news about the small compact fusion reactor that they were looking at in Skunk Works. As always, these things are more difficult than anybody could conceive, really. But I think there was a genuine discussion there. Yes, this is a long-term thing, but we think it could be possible.

So, we're going to have stories coming out about this. I almost feel like I don't want to spoil the surprise, but one of them was a hypersonic design from Boeing, which indeed said, if you could develop this compact fusion system, it would be the ideal solution for longer range propulsion.

Another thing that I really found fascinating was the Gullwing airliner design that a NASA study came out with. I mean, the inevitable fact about the next new airliner is that whatever engine it's going to have, whether it's an open fan, an open rotor, or a ducted engine, it's going to require a lot of ground clearance for that. Because of the sheer diameter, you're talking about wide bodied engines on a single aisle airplane.

So how do you do that? And of course, you know, Boeing with the X-66 is looking at a high wing, so that wouldn't be potentially so much of an issue. But Airbus certainly has said that they've hinted that a gull wing, you know, one which has got an increased dihedral angle at the inboard section, would be the best way to fit that under the wing. So it would be interesting, the NASA design that sort of discussion that came out about that showed that this wing

was definitely a viable option. And there were some really interesting side aspects to that. One is that their study actually showed that the gullwing, which everybody assumes is structurally more heavy and more complicated to build, actually may be slightly lighter, but they have to go back and do more research and to understand that.

see why that could be the case. But I suppose the thing, one thing, and I kind of didn't actually put this in the story weirdly enough, is that no matter what happens, you're looking at probably having to have a tea tale in the future.

which I think is kind of an interesting side fallout of all these designs. Whether you put these big engines at the tail, you're going to have to have a T-tail. The high wing option, that necessarily would have to give you a T-tail, I think, because of the wash. And then rotor wash, even from a gull wing, would mean, again, a T-tail. So,

You know, we've seen pretty well straight designs from Boeing and Airbus that dominate today, the 320 and the 737. But, you know, I think we're looking at the return of the T-Tail one way or another. So this is a call to any BAC-111,

do you have Lintrident or Vickers VC-10 engineers that are still alive out there? There's a job for you coming in. They were the last T-Tail airline as well. They lost that trio. Well, don't forget the MD series. Oh, well, that was American. Who cares about that? And then regional jets for T-Tail. I see RJ. Yeah, of course, the T-Tail families are out there today, but there are, I wouldn't say a dying breed, but they're,

pretty restricted. And certainly when it comes to the big narrowbodies, the last surviving 717s, MD-90s are perhaps the last of those interesting series. And I do remember Phil Condit of all people saying, no, Boeing will never do another T-tail. They're just too awkward. So maybe things are changing, but I think propulsion as always is driving the future like that.

No, no, that's a great segue because one of the things that has become good for us, right, this is very much our view of SciTech, they've got very good at doing focused sessions where they bring together multiple papers, multiple presentations around a theme. And they do many, many of these now over the week at SciTech. And the European Clean Aviation has taken great advantage of that. And it's a great forum for the Europeans to

present their programs in it to us audience, including us. So, um, and so this, and of course the clean aviation program at the moment, which is the big European program, very, very heavily propulsion focused. And, uh, so we did get, uh, some great updates on, on where they are with their plans to test both, uh, hybrid electric regional engines and, uh, and, and single aisle engines, which will have some degree of, of hybridization in the mid probably, you

One of the things I saw was this, and we're seeing it across the industry at the moment, this kind of shift to hybrid as being the way to get to electrification. We knew that it was always going to be the way to electrification because batteries are not where they need to be, but people were kind of resisting it because it's complicated. You sit through any of these presentations that involve hybrid propulsion and your head almost explodes because it's so complicated how you get the energy to move around

changing it from one form to the other and managing it, moving it between one propulsor and another or something like that. But, but it's, it's, it's definitely coming. So I think that one of the highlights for me was, was they did something unusual this year. They had a couple of keynotes in some of the sort of side sessions or the, you know, and where they had industry. So they had the guys from Electra, you know,

John Langford and Chris Curtin, who basically talked about the testing of their hybrid electric Eastall Extreme Stoll testbed aircraft. Very interesting, great video. This thing takes off on an absolute postage stamp. But the highlight was Kyle Clark, who's the founder and CEO of Beta Technologies.

He's a former hockey player, so he's a very imposing figure, very dynamic figure, very open and honest figure. And he just did an incredible briefing on where Beta is, including showing video. They have a thing called Al-Ali, a development at the moment, which is their e-VTOL, e-CTOL, e-VTOL. Before that, they did a kind of like a one-off e-VTOL, one of the very first e-VTOLs to fly, and probably one of the very first to be flown by a pilot,

And he showed some video of this thing. So just extraordinary what he was able to do with this kind of one-off. But he said he learned a lot of lessons about how not to do an eVTOL by building this. But it led directly to the Alia. And that was just a great presentation. And so most of my time was spent there. But also, you know, we know that across the conference that

NASA was briefing on progress with X-59, which is still not to fly, but is moving through its ground testing, getting ready to begin flying and then do its boom testing. And they gave some briefings on Susan, which is an internal study into a sort of a hydroelectric aircraft design that combines both sort of what they call these letterbox type things.

ducted fans in the wing and a tail thruster. So they're continuing to sort of think this. We're beginning to see the first signs of NASA beginning to explore the hydrogen space. The Europeans are quite far forward.

But the US is beginning to take a look. We got great insight into Pratt & Whitney's HiSight hydrogen cycle engine, which Guy will be writing about. I mean, if you want to blow your head apart, try and understand the cycle of HiSight. But it is fascinating what they can do. And similarly, there was an absolutely brilliant presentation from Airbus yesterday.

on Ascend and Cryoprop, which are their superconducting electric demonstration programs. The Ascend they've done and they demonstrated a big benefit from using liquid hydrogen to cool

the electrics in an airplane and get, get reduced the resistance, improve the efficiency. And they really were surprised how well it worked. They're now moving to like, you know, essentially an engine sort of like demonstrator and the cryo prop. And they want to show that they can get those benefits on a more representative sort of engine type architecture, but they're very, very excited about, about it. And they're looking at by the end of 2030, maybe being in a position to put this on an airplane and fly it. So again, propulsion is,

important to this conference. Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned HiSight. The fact that that is now being explained really, or at least they're trying to explain it to us to try and figure out how on earth you integrate hydrogen into a propulsion system that essentially could be packaged

to fly on today's aircraft, you know, within the nacelle outline. But yeah, and thank you for no pressure there, trying to put that out. It's a comprehensible story. But anyway, that's to come shortly. So, of course, we also did have a chance to...

to actually, as you mentioned earlier, to speak with Clay Mowry. And, you know, of course, he's brand new into the job. Well, 100 days, as he'll explain. But, yeah, of course, as many listeners know, Clay is a space industry veteran. He continues to serve as president of the International Astronautical Federation.

And over his career, he's worked for various companies ranging from Ariane Space to Voyager Space and Blue Origin. Anyway, this is what he had to say.

I'm super proud. I'm about 100 days on the job now with AIAA. This is my first SciTech event, and it's a treasure. It's kind of like a secret formula we got down here. This is our largest SciTech ever. This morning, the last number I saw was 6,123 people registered to attend this event. We have over 3,000 or almost 3,000 technical papers

that are being presented at this event, which is a huge, when you start actually thinking about the number of people that are here and the number of technical papers. And then that all goes back, that will end up in our technical library for our journals and publications. So that's really kind of our flywheel for AIAA is getting all that

really cutting-edge technical content, putting it into our library and then having that as a resource for all of our engineers as they're designing and developing new capabilities and technologies. About 2,000 of the attendees out of the 6,000 are students, which is also really impressive. People ask me why is this event in the beginning of January, right? Like you're really kicking right off, right? Right after the new year. Well, it's because a lot of the students are still on break. They haven't gone back to university.

We're able to get the professors and university students here. So it's an optimal time for them to come and present papers. So you get a ton of people here from universities all over the world. And the other thing that's kind of secret about SciTech is we get huge delegations, international delegations that come here to present. The DOR, for instance, the German Aerospace Center, sends about 50 of their top engineers to come here and present and learn.

So it's a really interesting time for us, I would say just broadly. And by the way, this is both, we have both the aeronautics and the astronautics community here. So we're, whatever you want to call that, we're ecumenical and we're welcoming both sides of the house of AIAA. And Graham, you also asked how well AIAA was doing in its efforts to appeal to a wider multidisciplinary audience.

It's a great question. We spend a lot of time thinking about this. My first 100 days, this issue that you're talking about, which is cross-cutting content again and again and again. And it's really a struggle for us in terms of how—not a struggle, a challenge—

in terms of how we organize ourselves, right? Because we have 71 technical committees here. And each one of those technical committees has a specific area of focus. So it's very hard then, you say, across a domain, whatever that domain can be, aviation, space, or thermal dynamics, structures, how do you see across that domain and integrate that content, both in our forums,

in our papers, our publications. It's a flywheel. It all keeps flowing back. So you come here, you present a paper, that goes into our library. We license that library out and more content keeps coming in and

And the cycle keeps spinning off more and more high-end content. So how do we think about organizing around those cutting-edge things? We have domain leads right now within the organization. We've got task force that we put in place. We also have board-directed committees that try to look across the domain. It's tricky, as you can imagine, because anybody who is a practitioner in this business that's doing it...

Who is the person that's zooming out and kind of looking across the field to understand how does that apply? AI is a great example, but supercomputing we talked about, and a lot of these other areas, autonomy. These are areas that crosscut advanced manufacturing, additive manufacturing, other areas where they cut across the entire domain.

Guidance, navigation, control. These are things that are cross-cutting issues that we have to think about. So what do we do? We create task forces around these. We try to make sure that I was at the publications committee group this morning. We were talking about this for about half an hour. How do we make sure that we are thinking about this stuff as cross-cutting, that we can get across that one domain into all of our publications that come out of this?

not an easy thing to tackle, but super valuable, right? Because otherwise you're just focused down and you're looking at your shoes and what's right in front of you. You're not really looking at the bigger, broader picture of how do you implement some of these technology changes to advance whatever your domain is. I remember being on a panel at AIAA Aviation one year. Somebody asked about getting, you know, some young person asked about getting into engineering and

how would they recommend it? And I said, "You want to be, the best job is to be an engine expert at an airframe company or an airframe expert at an engine company." I said, "Because the really interesting stuff comes at the interfaces between the disciplines. You know, it's not necessarily the discipline where you're going to get the real challenges. It's where two things come together. If you want a really interesting career,

go for that interface. When I was a young man, I remember the first conversation I had with someone, it was actually at ESA headquarters, and I was over there and I was talking to one of the guys and he said, you know, he said, you realize that in our domain it's complex systems of systems engineering and that this is really what, at the heart, it's not just propulsion, guidance, navigation, control,

structures, whatever. It's actually figuring out how do you make all these disparate areas of expertise fit and function in something that's flying at a super high speed under huge loads of thermal, acoustic, all the environmental stuff that's going on at the same time and make sure it works perfectly and you put the thing exactly where it needs to go into space.

And it struck me, you know, from my background, I was like, wow, this is exactly. And so this is what we're trying to do here, right? And I think you hit the nail on the head. We're trying to figure out on that systems of systems. How do you integrate propulsion into an airframe? How do you think about...

how we can achieve better, more efficient air travel, cheaper, low cost, greener, less noise, less pollution, all those things. It's a complex systems-to-systems approach to what we're doing. We've made huge advances, and you guys are old enough to remember how loud those planes were landing back in our day, taking off and landing, and where we are now. It's just a huge change in terms of fuel efficiency, noise,

and operability, right? The MRO has gone way down, right? For a lot of these aircraft. - We also talked to Clay about AIAA's efforts to boost diversification. And this is what he said.

Obviously there's more women graduating from college now. Attracting them to get into engineering programs and come and work in our industry is a challenge because the demographics are shifting and have shifted dramatically on that. So we need to be able to attract the right talent to come and work here. So it's great to walk the floor here and see people from all over the world and to see... I've had a chance to work with and mentor some of the...

young women engineers that are here, some from internationally as well. So we do some work with international scholarship. We run some competitions and things to try to get folks to come here and present papers. And it's been really, it's heartwarming, right, to see them come, want to come here, learn, figure out how to get a job in the business and succeed. So it's really neat to see. I'm glad to see that we're getting, opening the aperture.

Finally, we discussed Clay's vision for how AIAA can evolve into the future. We're not just a trade show, right? All of our stuff is built on a technical platform. We have all these papers that are presented. Yeah, we have a business-to-business platform on top of all of our events, but the core of it is this really important technical discussion and exchange that's going on where people are learning. So we want to make sure that that's a really big part of all the shows we do, Aviation, Ascend, SciTech, Defense.

We need to embrace that, not that we haven't embraced it, but we need to actually even promote it even more that we have the highest quality technical content that gives a reason for these engineers and technical domain leads to come to our event. Then we can build a really nice platform on top of that. I know this kind of sounds simple, but really in practice it's hard, where you have these cross-cutting issues, where you look at the big picture stuff, the real big trends, and they evolve every year. So I don't want to say, okay, I mean, I can talk a lot about AI and

air mobility and green aviation, things like that. And certainly those will be trends in the next year. But I can't even tell you what the trends will be three years from now because hopefully they'll evolve and we'll be on the front end of that.

But making sure that we have that content at the top of our events and we give a reason for people to come back year after year. And so my focus and with the staff has been really about that thought leadership, the technical leadership, and making sure that, you know, I know it's going to sound a little geeky, you know, but we really want to dig in on that technical front and make sure it's kind of a unique value proposition that we put forward at our events. We're not just like a regular trade show organization.

And I don't mean to run down in the other shows that are out there, the for-profit industry, but we're doing something a little different as a nonprofit and we want to keep embracing that. Right. And that's it. And so, Graham, I think we both agreed one of the most bizarre presentations and fascinating was the one that you went to as well. Could you tell us a bit about that? Yeah.

Yes, well, I'm just glad I didn't tell Steve Trimble about this because he had already got his underwear in a twist over fifth, sixth generation. There was a presentation on seventh generation fighters and hypersonic aerial gunnery projectiles. And it was extraordinary, a very impassioned, very, very dynamic presentation by a researcher. And basically, yeah,

His point was that in the US, aerial gunnery ammunition innovation has just stopped. There has been none. There have been no new projectiles, you know, actual sort of bullets, cannon shells, etc.

developed for aerial gunnery really since the 50s, you know, and they've fallen far behind the Navy and the Army in advancing the ballistic coefficients and everything like that of their gunnery. So, and to the point where they have just stopped all research, they have two contracts that they compete with,

in essence, to develop this ammunition. There's no incentive to innovate at all. And it was a really, really impassioned presentation. But meanwhile, there's a consortium of a group of universities that have been continuing to develop hypersonic projectiles. And what they've done is they've developed a discarding sabot projectile

if that's how you say it, Sabo, Sabo. Discarding Sabo round for aerial gunnery. So basically this has a tungsten flechette. It looks like a knitting needle. A tungsten flechette that is around it is a Sabo that,

that fits it into the barrel. When it fires out of the barrel, the, the jet goes forward and the sabot basically is designed. It's, it's discarded, but it's designed to do a 180 degree turn away from the aircraft and get away from the airplane without it. And they know where it's going to go. It's predictable. The pilot can turn and know that they're not going to run into the sabot as it's, as sabot as it's going. Uh,

I mean, and they've tested these, they've done 10 millimeter, 20 millimeter, 30 millimeter test rounds fired on the ground. The performance is extraordinary, right? You know, this thing comes out of the barrel at Mark V or something like that. They estimate that, you know, that in a sort of a hard shot, you know, from an airplane, it'll go a hundred miles with one of these flechettes, right? So,

So, you know, so he envisioned having, you know, a seventh generation fighter, being able to hit targets 100 miles away with this thing. It can be used for counter drones, with the smaller rounds. It could be used on a seventh generation fighter for counter missile at shorter range.

The really interesting thing there is, and he tried to explain this, is that as the round goes towards the missile, the missile sees it as the target and the missile homes onto the projectile. And actually they annihilate each other. They kind of let, he said, it's like an attractor. They can't stop hitting each other because basically the missile, the infrared missile sees it as the target.

And even more extraordinary, at longer range on a seventh generation fighter, you'd fire three of these. They would form a synthetic aperture radar in the sky and guide themselves onto the target at ranges of tens of miles.

So they're able to guide themselves, even though they're incredibly small, really, relative to a missile. Yeah, so they either have a ballistically aerostable or a maneuvering aerostable sabot, but then the round can be either just ballistic or it can have some sort of guidance to it. He was not able to get into a lot of the details of this because clearly, you know, it's fairly sensitive, some of this stuff.

if they can get the military interested. And then he talked about its air-to-ground. They're able to get the same armoured penetration with a 20mm round that the A-10 gets with a current 30mm round, so you can have a much smaller, less recoiled gun that could punch through to the upper armour of a tank, whereas you need that versus an A-10.

So there's all of these things, right? So basically he was just making an appeal that there needs to be pressure put on. And okay, his initial target is the AC-130 gunship. And he talked about what this would do. It would basically allow an AC-130 to sit

outside of a surface, a man pad surface to a missile threat zone and suppress the entire threat zone of that missile. So we'd be able to just sit there just outside the threat zone and suppress all the ground within that area, which you can't do in an AC-130 at the moment.

You can use it with suppressors, which means that it swallows the flame and so you don't see the aircraft when it's firing. It can be used for all different types of things. So he says in order for this to move out of the R&D, they have to get the military to write a requirement for it. So he's trying to get an upswell of grassroots support to get Special Operations Command to write a requirement for hypersonic weapons.

discarding Sub-O ammunition for the AC-130. That will get it into the program's promote system in the DoD. And then we'd restart. It's seventh generation because he said it's too late for sixth generation. There's just too much, too many institutional barriers within the DoD to doing anything for sixth generation. We're not even there yet, right? So it just shows you how much

The military isn't interested in ammunition, but he said it could completely redefine how you do not just air to air gunnery, but air to ground. So it was a facet and it was just done with great panache. It was a great question. I apologise for not remembering his name. If anybody wants to email me, I will be able to point you towards him. But my cold prevented me from researching his name and I apologise for that.

I love the fact that a potential seventh generation combat aircraft technology could be paved or pioneered on an aircraft that's going to be 70 years old or 70 years old. Fantastic. Well, that's another irony and yet another example of how broad and varied the material is from the SciTech conference. Yeah.

right guy there is always something at this conference that really really sort of um stands out as being unusual two years ago or something like that it was a nuclear propulsion just heard about it you know being talked about like one mentioned this year there it is in the presentations you know so uh so it's very worth being at this event so anyway that's a wrap for today's check six thanks to our editor in london guy fernio and don't forget to follow us in your podcast app of choice

And one last request. If you're listening to us in Apple Podcasts and want to support this podcast, please leave us a star rating or write a review. And bye for now. Thanks for listening.