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Join us at Aero Engines Europe 2025 in Hamburg this September. Hear from leading experts about the challenges and opportunities in MRO, supply chain optimization, and the paths to net-zero emissions and next-gen engine technologies.
Featured items include a shop tour and hosted reception on the historic Cap San Diego. Check 6 listeners save 20% with promotion code CHECK6. Register at aeroengineseurope.aviationweek.com. See you in Hamburg. Welcome to this week's Check 6 podcast. I'm Joanne Somo, Aviation Week's Editorial Director and Editor-in-Chief of Aviation Week and Space Technology Magazine.
Air travel has evolved greatly over the last hundred years, but one thing has remained the same: passengers still sit in a tube connected to wings. A California startup wants to change that. In 2023, Aviation Week's Guy Norris broke the details of Jet Zero's plan to develop a 250-seat blended wing body airliner that could double as a military tanker transport. Two years later, Jet Zero continues to move forward.
Bolstered by $235 million in U.S. Air Force funding, Jet Zero has partnered with Northrop Grumman Scaled Composites to build a prototype to validate the blended wing body concept. To test the aircraft is on track to fly in late 2027. Jet Zero has also teamed up with Siemens to incorporate cutting-edge digital design tools. If it works out, and that's still a big if, Jet Zero hopes to be building 200 airliners a year in the 2030s.
United Airlines, Delta Airlines, and Alaska Airlines have all said that they will order the airplane if it comes to market.
Guy, Aviation Week's Steve Trimble, and I attended Jet Zero's first media day last week at the company's headquarters at Long Beach Airport. They're here with me now to provide their impressions. Guy, let's start off for our listeners that aren't quite sure what a BWB airplane is. Tell us what it is and what the advantages of using it are. Good question, Joe. Honestly, the best way to describe it is...
As the word suggests, blended. It's a blend of the fuselage and wings in a seamless way that creates this large lifting surface. So what you do is essentially is by eliminating the wing body junction, you not only reduce drag that would be formed there, but you actually increase the lifting area of the whole aircraft, the whole vehicle, right?
So the lift minus the drag, if you like, make sure that you're sort of going to a new level of efficiency that's really never been achievable before with tube and wing. The other thing, of course, is that you create this massive internal volume.
sort of for free, which enables you to do all sorts of clever things inside, maximize the efficiency of the internal area and carry a lot more fuel, for example, if that's what you want to do or cargo and so forth. So it really does just change the game. And they're claiming a 50% improvement in fuel burn?
They are. Now, you've got to remember that that does include potentially advanced engines. So we're going to talk a little bit about where we are with engines here. But it does imagine that you're talking about the very latest in propulsion technology as well as aerodynamics. So a lot of things have to come together to get that magic 50%. But, you know, we'll talk a little bit about how they get there.
And one of the things that struck me, they have a mock-up of the cabin. So, you know, we're all used to getting on an airplane and you walk through the first class all the way to the back. And this is more like a room, I mean, because it's sort of a square cabin that narrows toward the cockpit, but with a really wide door. It's a completely different concept from anything we've ever seen.
So Jet Zero's initial family versions are called the Z3, 4 and 5. And the 4 refers to the four bays or fuselage sort of cabin areas, which you kind of are describing there, Joe. And you're right. When you enter the inside of this mock-up, you're presented with a sort of atrium area, which...
again is sort of an unusual thing in itself. It spreads itself. You can go left to what they would say would be first class, right into this area with four main bays. Each bay is, as you say, squared off. It's made up of four separate aisles and then divided, depending on how the configuration goes, into coach and business type class seats.
The main thing they're saying is that you can throw away all your concepts, the previous ideas of getting on board a tube. You're talking about reimagining in the interior, you know, what's possible in new cabins. And one of the things, for example, I say is every single seat, regardless, will have its own dedicated overhead baggage area. So you don't have that...
pre-flight nerves about whether you'll make it in time to your seat to find enough space for your carry-on and stuff like that. It just does change the game in terms of what people can imagine with the interior. And the other thing is, of course, you know, I said, well, is this going back to the great days of the early 70s when Pan Am
wanted to put a piano bar on the upper deck of the 747. And the realism of economics soon got rid of things like that. Will you just literally fill this thing with seats? And they say, well, to a point, you can do that. But there are certain...
limits within this area which will actually keep the airlines restricted in a way in this particular configuration to around 250 seats maximum so and you'll still make money that's what they're saying it doesn't matter about that but uh it will they will be resisting the temptation to say say put a 500 people in there you can't
Steve Trimble, I think you, Guy, and I all agreed that their media day was impressive. We came away, we learned a lot. Did you come away more impressed with Jet Zero's chances for being a viable business?
Okay. The thing that really got driven home on that media day is you see the investment that's been made in the past two years with the financing that they've been able to raise.
in two big areas. One is infrastructure for testing and simulation on the ground and a bit in the air with their Pathfinder subscale demonstrator series. And then also investment in people. They've gone out and hired a lot of very impressive people from all over the aerospace industry, all over the world. And they've all come, and some of them are still in different places, but a large group is there in Long Beach.
And that's very impressive. You know, you do see that investment taking shape. You see the we saw the various test facilities they have in there. They're testing control laws. They've got to get to a full scale demonstrator flight test by 2027.
Scale Composites is building the aircraft right now, and they're working on the flight control laws for the fly-by-wire system on that demonstrator. That's absolutely essential for them to move to the next phase where they start developing the airliner version of it, perhaps. There's also a chance, perhaps, that a military air refueling version of the aircraft will
could become viable if certain things happen in the Air Force modernization priority plan, which are not quite at the moment envisioned. But everything is steaming towards this 2027 first flight date for that full scale flight demonstrator of that aircraft. And, you know, Guy and I were talking before the call about all the things that they're going to have to prove. And, you know, because this is a new configuration. It's a new aircraft. It's not
You know, on top of all the things that Boeing or Airbus would have to prove every time they come out with the next tube and wing type aircraft, there's a lot of new things that are just inherent with a new aircraft design that, you know, they'll have to go over some very fundamental things. And sometimes that can be easy. Usually it's very complicated and often it's very expensive. So those are the big challenges. We can go into those in more detail, too.
Guy, I have to agree. When I put my skeptic hat on, it's just like Steve said, they're developing a brand new aircraft from scratch and they're going to draw on the same supply chain as Boeing and Airbus. Boeing and Airbus are having a hard time building airplanes that they've done for decades because of the supply chain. And I kept asking them, well, how do you think you can spool up and have everything go perfect? And they just kept saying, well, we're just doing it from scratch.
Yeah, but I do think that their plan recognizes the fact that, you know, spooling up, as you say, is it's not going to be either easy or fast. And they do sort of acknowledge that, you know, in terms of production, they're going to look at they've narrowed down their search for a production site to the final three. I think they've looked at they looked at 24 locations around 13 states.
Now, the reason they've deferred the decision on down select to the final one is because they've gone back to these three finalists and they're all coming back with incentivized packages. So, you know, I think they're going to be...
announcing the final site in the next few months. But what it does mean is that they know what the challenges are. And one of the things that they're sort of saying is that this phased build-up to production is going to take in all the lessons learned that they've seen on other sites. So they're kind of looking at one bay that will produce five aircrafts,
building on a second that will add in a next phase and a further five and then moving to the third phase where they'll double up both of those two and replicate exactly the same production system so but they know this is going to take a few years so it's going to be a steady approach if you like I'm looking for the numbers I can't see them right now but I'll try and get them to you before the end of the podcast
Steve, the one thing to echo what you said, I was impressed by the quality of the management team, Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, SpaceX, NASA, Gulfstream, veterans, solid management team, suppliers, Northrop, Siemens, Thales, Parker, Saffron, Pratt, Whitney, Eaton, Woodward, good aerospace companies. These guys are for real, unlike some of the other ventures maybe we've come across.
Yeah. Oh, I mean, yes, that they have the financing in place to make a proper go at this. But, you know, the supply chain is is an interesting part of this. Right. Because it's so essential to their strategy and also sort of fundamental to how you look at this new configuration. Right. You know.
for decades, we have, to advance the cause of commercial air travel and even military airlift and air refueling, there's always been this pursuit of the next big increase in fuel efficiency has to come from the propulsion. And you're just constantly trying to generate new miracles from that propulsive Brayden cycle process. And we've seen the
the challenges with continuing to rely on propulsion, on advances in propulsion technology, where it gets almost to the breaking point, like literally. And so you see setbacks with engine certifications and in-service issues that have to be addressed and fleet groundings and fleet repairs. And so that issue has been a big problem for airlines and for everybody.
And now you can go to this totally different paradigm because you're going to a blended wing body where the efficiency doesn't come from that engine improvement. In fact, they're going to use that 40-year-old engine on the demonstrator, and they might even use an improved version of that for the commercial airliner entry into service standard with the PW2040 engine.
So you can use that blended wing body configuration to get that generational leap in fuel efficiency, plus operate at a higher altitude, a more efficient altitude. So those are good things. But, of course, that comes with tradeoffs, right? I mean, one of the things Guy and I were talking about right before the call is, I mean, you look at that aircraft and you just want, how is that going to stall?
Right. Yeah. How is an aircraft like that going to stall in flight is going to pitch down like the FAA wants? Because, you know, if it pitches down, your your problem becomes your solution. Right. Because how do you recover from a stall as you pitch the aircraft down? You get more speed and you get air over the control services, keep going. But on an aft on an aft weighted plane.
aircraft, with those big engines in the back, you feel like it might be more like 727, where you risk it going into a deep stall where the aircraft pitches up and the airflow... The aircraft itself blocks the airflow from going over the control surfaces, so you can't recover. Now,
The Jet Zero aircraft is not a 727. It's a fly-by-wire aircraft. And as the test pilot assured me, they have envelope protections built in, of course, that would make it almost impossible for a pilot to stall the aircraft. And I would emphasize that word, almost, right? Because pilots always find a way to do this. And so the FAA is going to look at that, and they need to figure out a way to show that...
even if it does pitch up, that the recovery will be smooth and predictable, you know, and you won't get into that deep stall regime that they saw with the 727 decades ago. So, so that's one part of it. Yeah.
When we talk about it, the CEO is talking about how this is not a clean sheet aircraft. It's a clean slate aircraft. And by that, it means, yes, it's a new airframe, but they're not asking suppliers to invent new systems or new architectures.
to fill that airplane with all the stuff it needs, the hydraulics, the pneumatics, the propulsion, the avionics. Everything is going to come off the shelf. You don't need to extract every little ounce of performance from each of those subsystems to get to that higher level, as some of the tube and wing aircraft configurations have to do as they introduce new and improved versions of them. But even then, what does...
what do these improvements look like or what these off-the-shelf subsystems look like? We were talking about the PW2040s, great example. Yes, you can take this 40-year-old engine, put it on a Jet Zero, and you're still going to get this reduction in fuel efficiency because of this aerodynamic configuration, because you're operating at a higher altitude. But at the same time, that combustor is a 40-year-old combustor.
And airlines aren't going to want to buy it unless it's got the NOx emissions reductions of a modern combustor. So you're going to have to change the combustor. You're going to change the FADAC. And as the head of engineering for Jet Zero also talked about, they're mounting in a new place, right? It's not under the wing anymore. It's now on top of the aircraft at the very back.
And, you know, so that means they have to change the mounting structure, which changes a lot of things about how you put together all those internal components in the engine. So, you know, I mean, it just and, you know, extrapolate that to all the subsystems. You know, there's going to be tweaks here and changes there to adapt each of those existing off the shelf subsystems for this new configuration.
This all can be done, but these are all the complications. These are all the challenges that they have to go through and the things that they have to prove. And proving it to me or proving it to Guy or proving it to the airline is one thing, but to prove it to the FAA satisfaction, that's the real standard that they have, that's the real challenge. And that can be a very expensive challenge.
Sorry, just jumping in. So first of all, on the production side, I just want to go back quickly before I forget. The plan is to, by the end of the fifth year of production, be making 20 a month. That's their plan. And they said, we know this sounds like a lot, but it's a step up approach. And what they're looking at is making, they call it the four corner approach.
They're basically saying wings, the back deck and the nose can all be given out to other manufacturers and they're going to put those out to bid. Their main part is obviously building that massive big centre body. So that's their focus for production. And they're saying, yes, it's a long wingspan, but it's a short body aeroplane with fairly simple architecture. There's kind of all the control services are hinged, for example. There's no big forged titanium parts.
And as we've said, there's lots of commercial off-the-shelf parts within the system, within the aircraft, well understood. So anyway, that's what they're trying to say is that, you know, the 787 at its height managed to get to 14 a month. And they're saying they can do better than that because...
They're coming in from this clean slate approach that Steve said. And the couple of things that Steve raised, the FAA, it's part, you know, part 25, 2003 stipulates very specifically that the aircraft must be controllable during and after a stall with roll and yaw being correctable via ailerons and rudder, of course, but no abnormal nose up pitching must occur. So, yeah,
And that's written in stone, you know, these days, especially after the, you know, the terrible experiences that the Boeing, the MAX, you know, and the MCAS system went through. So there's no changing that, and they're going to have to figure it out. So my final area I was just going to quickly address is on the engines. And Steve again mentioned the fact that the ye olde Pratt & Whitney 2000 engines
It's a great engine, it's been remarkable and it's done fantastically well. On the C17 it's still being in low-level production for spares, I believe.
So resurrecting that, but with some improvements, who'd have thought that in 2030 almost, you'd be looking at an engine that by then is going to be 50 years old, that might be the perfect solution. It's so counterintuitive when for the past three decades, all the engine manufacturers and the airframers have been banging on about greater and greater bypass ratios,
you know, 11 to 1 with things like the Leap and going to even greater bypass ratios with the Rise and the, you know, say the Ultrafan or the G9X. Now, all of a sudden, you've got a manufacturer who says, no, you don't need to worry about that. We can get away with it.
We don't have to worry about the noise because the engines are on top of the top deck. We don't have to worry about the efficiency because of the built-in low drag and improved performance of the blended wing body. So what we need is an engine that gives us a constant, no more than 80% max continuous thrust rating all the way from sea level to our new higher altitude cruise capability at 45,000 feet.
That's where the sweet spot is for the blended wing body in terms of cruise. So the specification they are asking for the engine makers is a higher top of climb thrust, which you can only get with a relatively smaller bypass ratio. That's why they're driving towards back to the future, as it were, with an engine like the PW2000 or even further, an RB211, if such thing could be resurrected.
And I think finally, I should say that they know Pratt's in the driving seat, certainly for the demonstrator, as Steve said, but also for the production version at this stage. But they do say the airlines say they want a competition. They want a choice of engines. So somebody else is going to be asked to come in. What engine could that be? The only other engine in that class with that kind of bypass ratio would be the RB211, which...
doesn't really have a FADEC. No, and would be massively expensive to... I don't think Rolls could even consider bringing it back into production. I don't know, I don't know. But weirdly, four engine makers proposed at the last airline meeting that they had in just a few weeks ago. Yes, Pratt & Whitney, of course, Rolls-Royce,
GE stroke CFM was the third one. But who was the other one? Kratos FTT, which, of course, is the engine maker developing the symphony for Boom's Overture, Supersonic Airliner.
So, you know, we're in to a changing world of potential suppliers here. And this is just another paradigm shift. You know, I don't know whether it will come off. Who knows? But it shows the ambitions of FTT. It shows the ambitions of new players like Jet Zero.
Guys, we're just about out of time. I did want to ask you, it costs billions of dollars to develop a new airplane. They have not raised billions of dollars yet. Do they have enough to see them through the test flight of the demonstrator and then hope the investment follows? Is that the plan?
So I did have a conversation about this with Tom O'Leary. And yeah, they're doing their series B around finance. They're gathering that at the moment. And with that, that unlocks the next tranche of financing support from the U.S. Air Force. You may recall that U.S. Air Force awarded them $235 million contract that is awarded in tranches. And each tranche is aligned with
matching private fundraising. So with that, that's how they get to fund that demonstrator. But here's just one last point I want to make, because it's really important, I think. Let's just say, let's give them, they've got certification. All these challenges that we've talked about, they get that through the FAA. Before they get the airline support, the question is, what does Boeing and Airbus do, right?
Boeing is in a tight position right now. I don't know if they've got the money or the wherewithal to respond directly in the near future. Airbus may be a different story. If you rewind the clock 10 years, Boeing had the new mid-market airplane, the NMA concept. And that was going to be a clean sheet aircraft, tube and wing, going after the exact same market that Jet Zero is aiming for, that middle of the market segment.
And Boeing was going to have to pay tens of billions of dollars to bring that aircraft to market, just like Jet Zero was probably going to have to raise that much money to do that. And at the time, every time we wrote that story, we always wrote that the response could come from Airbus with an A322.
Another derivative, a pretty advanced derivative. They're going to do something new with the wing. Probably they're going to do something different with the engine. Go from a planetary gear to a star gear. If it was geared turbofan, for example. Those are big changes, but not quite a clean sheet aircraft. So and the question is, what will Airbus do? Right. If Jet Zero is successful in bringing to this this to the market?
At that point, you're going to have to have airlines say that they want a third option in the market in this category. And that's the only way a company like Jet Zero can survive, I think. Yeah, I give you the final word. Go quick.
I talked to Dan De Silva, the COO, and he says, if Boeing and Airbus at the moment, as they do look like the next generation is going to be single, and he says, bring it on, because no airline wants to put their passengers in and yet another single tube and wing when it comes to the replacement market.
Guys, great conversation. We could go on for another hour, but we are out of time. So that is a wrap for this week's Check 6 podcast. A special thanks to our podcast producer in London, Guy Ferniho.
If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to Check 6 so you never miss an episode. If you found today's discussion helpful, consider leaving a rating or review. Better yet, share this episode with a friend or colleague. That's all the time we have for now. Thank you for your time and join us again next week for another Check 6. Join us at Aero Engines Europe 2025 in Hamburg this September.
Hear from leading experts about the challenges and opportunities in MRO, supply chain optimization, and the paths to net-zero emissions and next-gen engine technologies. Featured items include a shop tour and hosted reception on the historic Cap San Diego. Check six listeners, save 20% with promotion code CHECK6. Register at aeroengineseurope.aviationweek.com. See you in Hamburg.