NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

Hail the Dreamliner (Gregg Easterbrook, 12/22/09, ESPN: TMQ)

The Boeing 787 took flight last week after two years of delays, and air travelers everywhere should be pleased. Among other things, the Dreamliner is the first jetliner designed to reduce the sensation of turbulence for passengers. All previous jetliner designs have assumed that turbulence is just something you grit your teeth and tough out. The 787's engineers sought ways to make the plane pass more smoothly through the air, and calculated that an oval-shaped fuselage, rather than the traditional cylinder, would accomplish that. No way to be sure until the aircraft is in service, but if the Dreamliner does fly more smoothly than existing jets, passengers will consider it worth the wait.

Last week also saw the maiden flight of the Airbus A400M, an airborne moment to bureaucracy. This plane, the next main cargo aircraft for most European armies, has a few interesting technical features, including counter-rotating, scimitar-shaped propellers: instead of both engines on the same side spinning in the same direction, they spin in opposite directions, which has some advantages over the standard arrangement. But this aircraft has about the same speed and range, and only a somewhat better payload, as the C-133 Cargomaster, which the United States built in the 1950s. Just like NASA is now struggling to build new rockets little different from the ones it had in the 1960s, Airbus is struggling to build a cargo plane not that much different from models of the 1950s. Seven years passed between the decision to manufacture the aircraft and the first flight of the prototype!