How THIS aircraft could revolutionise Aviation!

hi everybody very welcome to mentor and yet another video podcast as always i hope you're doing absolutely fantastic today on the video i'm going to be talking about one of the strangest looking aircraft that i've ever seen picture a love child between a zeppelin and a glider yes we are going to be talking about the newly revealed otto celera 500l and in the episode i am going to be explaining laminar flow to you and what that has to do with this lyra l and also why i think that this aircraft has the potential to revolutionize a part of the aviation business so stay tuned when [Music] this video is brought to you in cooperation with brilliant now you are probably finding yourself just as i have been for the last few months trying to homeschool your children and finding that that is actually much harder than you thought it would be so i have been looking for ways to make that more fun entertaining and more efficient for everyone involved so i have been using brilliant with my 10 year 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looked weird so there was a lot of discussions on different forums at the time what this could potentially be was this a military application of some sort or what was it it was all very hush-hush and no one really knew but very soon we started to hear that this could potentially be the work of a company called auto aviation now what aviation is the brainchild of a man called bill otto who has had a lot of work inside of the american government and he is known to think outside of the box and this aircraft definitely is something out of the box so these last weeks we started to get to know a little bit more about what this strange bullet-looking aircraft was and it is called the autosalera 500l and it packs some truly amazing performance figures or how about this picture this aircraft flying with a range of 4 500 nautical miles that's the equivalent of what we can fly with the 737 or an airbus 320 neo it can do those 4 500 miles with a max crew speed of around 400 knots which is also not far away from what we are doing but the fuel consumption that it's claiming is between 18 to 25 miles per gallon in european terms that's about 10 kilometers per liter which is pretty much what i am using for my audi q5 which is sitting at the back it can carry a payload of six adult passengers and inside of the cabin you can actually stand completely straight if you are as tall as me you have six foot two inches in the cabin which is 188 centimeters now this is truly amazing figures okay and all of this combined means that they are claiming auto aviation are claiming on their website which are linked to by the way that they you can fly this aircraft with an hourly cost of about 328 dollars per hour now you might say well that doesn't sound very cheap better 328 dollars per hours is quite a lot of money but then you have to remember that with these kind of performance figures and this kind of range and speed you normally have to go up to a private jet and not even the smallest private jets maybe a medium-sized private jet and if you want to fly one of those it will cost you between well two to three thousand dollars per hour so that's ten times more than what this is costing almost now how is this possible how can they claim to have this kind of performance well it turns out that the answer to that is twofold first of all it has to do with a revolutionary engine that you're using now you might think that if you're going to be flying at these kind of speeds with this kind of range you need a jet engine but here's the first difference so they are using a newly certified engine called the red a03 this is a 12 cylinder normal combustion engine it is divided into two banks of six cylinders and these two banks are independently kind of controlled electrically controlled from each other which means that if you have a failure in one of the banks the remaining six cylinders would still work and that is supposed to provide you with the kind of redundancy that you'll get from a multi-engine aircraft it is built completely in aluminium the it produces 550 horsepower and it can run on both biodiesel and jet a1 fuel all right so this engine is extremely powerful and it's extremely efficient and it drives the one propeller the push propeller that uses so that's the first thing okay remember that using one engine and especially a high performance normal combustion engine means that you have significantly lower maintenance costs than you have on two jet engines not to mention just the price of the actual engine where jet engines will cost you millions of dollars and the v12 will not so here lies a little bit of the price difference all right but the really ingenious thing with this aircraft is its shape what bilotto realized was that you need to do something about the drag okay conventional aircraft have kind of come as far as they can when it comes to drag reduction um the the wings stabilizers and fins that we're using on conventional aircraft are extremely efficient at the moment but we haven't really worked too much with the body and other parts of the aircraft which still produces an enormous amount of drag and what what bill otto basically did here was he just thought outside the box thinking okay so what can we do in order to reduce this drag and he started looking into producing as much of the components as possible to utilize laminar flow now you might ask yourself what is laminar flow what is it talking about and the best way to explain this is that air is kind of like a fluid it has a viscosity which means that air tends to stick to surfaces which means that it divides itself up to layers which flows at different speeds so the layer closest to the skin tends to slow down and kind of stick and then the layers outside goes increasingly faster and as long as you have laminar flow well then these layers they cross each other without interacting too much they kind of glide on top of each other and just like the decks of a card if you spread them out they will kind of move in the laminar flow without interacting with each layer okay however that only works up to a certain speed so because of the viscosity of the air and something called a reynolds number which i'm not going to go in too much deeper in if the speed increases at some point this laminar flow will turn into what we call a turbulent flow instead the best way to show that is if you've been looking out over waterfall you notice that as the water goes over the edge it tends to be fully see-through fully transparent but then as it goes past the edge of the water fall and it starts accelerating it will turn this white color and when it goes from that transparent laminar flow into turbulent flow is when it turns over the white okay and what's actually happening is that the water in that case starts to interact the layers start to interact with each other they start to rub up against each other and that creates vortexes okay the another way that you can have a look at how this actually looks is in the comfort of your own home if you go to your closest water tap and you start opening the water tap with very slow flow you will initially see that you have clear water coming out but as you increase that flow that water will turn into white and that is the transition between laminar flow to turbulent flow now this turbulent flow when these layers are rubbing up against each other will create little vortexes and in order for these vortexes to be created you need energy all right and that energy needs to be taken from somewhere and in the case of an aircraft when it goes from laminar flow to turbulent flow that energy will take from the aircraft and the aircraft needs to take that energy from its fuel tanks so this means that the more you can create the aircraft to only have laminar flow in their normal cruise speeds the more efficient the aircraft will be and you can do that by shaping all of the components in a way that allows speed to keep the laminar flow for as long as possible and this is essentially what auto aviation have done that's why it looks like that that's why it looks so weird and they claim that by using laminar flow components on the aircraft they've actually managed to get the the overall drag down with 59 that's 59 lower drag than on a conv conventional aircraft of the same size okay or you might ask yourself why doesn't everyone do this why doesn't all of the aircraft in the world look like that the fact is that you can only build them so big if you start to make them much bigger than the salira 500 then the laminar flow will not work because you have the viscosity of the air is a constant and it needs to flow over the surface you make it much bigger they are still going to have to accelerate past the laminar flow line so you can't make it much bigger however auto aviation has said that they have a version coming out of the celera 500 called the cilera 1000 which is about 20 bigger than the current model which will increase the amount of people and payload and potential cargo that it can carry with a lot without you know increasing the uh the the cost of running it with too much so this is how they have managed to achieve this guys they're using this highly efficient v12 engine a push propeller and a push propeller by the way they have a push propeller because then the propeller and the slipstream from the propeller will not cause the laminar flow to stop okay so if you have a propeller in front of the aircraft or in front of the wings the slipstream will cause a bit of drag but if you have it behind then yes you will have a little bit of a disturbed airstream going into the propeller but because it is so aerodynamic that will be almost negligent and the airstream from the propeller will not disturb so that's why they have a push propeller rather than a propeller in the front so how far along are they then well they have done 35 different test flights with this aircraft which means they have been able to verify that these performance calculations and the performance figures that they have are actually correct okay but they still have a long way to go they have managed to secure the first wave of funding and now they're looking into starting their certification process with the faa and then they're looking into a second and a third round of financing and also finding space to build a full-scale factory in order to start delivering these aircraft they're planning on trying to deliver their first aircraft around 2025 and that's probably where they will get certification as well i know that there are people out there that's looking at this and saying that well you know we've seen these kind of aircraft before they come in they claim that they have these performance figures and then they just blow up like air bubbles they never become anything and there is a possibility that the solera 500l is one of those as well however these guys are actually flying this with a full-scale prototype so they have been able to prove that they're not you know they're not lying about the numbers these numbers actually do exist so why am i so excited about this aircraft then well it is what it represents the fact that it is so efficient and the fact that its cost is so low means that if this comes to production and if the purchase price of this aircraft which we don't yet know but it's likely going to be not in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands of dollars but if that is low enough it means that this has the potential to revolutionize the small charter and air taxi business because if you think about it the only people right now that can afford private flights are either the super rich the millionaires who have enough money to get access to a proper big private jet or even own a private jet and then you have the enthusiasts the people who owns their own cessna or maybe a beach king air or da42 um that could be like maybe private business owners that needs to do shorter trips um or just enthusiasts but if you want to go and you want to travel for a large distance like in this case four thousand nautical miles which is intra europe or between any city pair in the continental united states the only real choice you have at the moment is to fly commercially to fly with a normal aircraft but of course now during the pandemic our travel patterns are starting to change and we're starting to look at things like maybe i don't want to go to a crowded airport maybe i don't want to to go into a big air aircraft full of passengers if i can avoid it so if they can manage to produce what they're promising then i could see private taxi companies buying up a couple of these celera 500 elf and starting to provide people like you know a big family for example with the possibility of actually flying privately for a longer trip and reasonably affordable because the prices would according to their own calculations and according to my own calculations not be too different from what a slightly expensive normal airline ticket would be and if that happens you will see a boom of these airlines popping up all over the place you will see city pairs being connected that haven't been connected before because before with the previous cost structure it wasn't financially viable to fly between these city pairs in places like maybe scotland sweden norway finland canada russia the outback in australia places where you know airlines wouldn't have looked to actually connect city pairs now you can and that means that that can be a huge lift in the economy for these smaller cities for the economy in these smaller cities for companies that are based in these smaller cities and on top of this and this is where it starts to get really exciting is that auto aviation have already said that the salira 500 and the 1000 that might come after it is fully prepared for electric drive if needed right they know that there's going to be highly efficient electrical or hybrid engine coming and this aircraft can be retrofitted and can be fitted with these engines and because of the extreme efficiency of the aircraft you could actually get some decent mileage out of already existing electrical engines and of course what you're looking at then is a part and arm of the aviation industry that could be both economical for normal people just like you and i and it could be environmentally friendly in fact it already is i mean it doesn't cost more than driving a normal car to drive this aircraft and you can fit six people into it and it could have a fantastic effect on the local economy on top of that these aircrafts are going to need pilots so it means that there's going to be a boom in the need of pilots probably low hour pilots because it's likely that this is going to be a single pilot aircraft even though i've reached out to auto aviation but i haven't heard back from them but even if it is a single pilot aircraft if it is in taxi operation it's likely that it's still going to be dual pilot operation and even so there's still going to be new jobs that didn't exist before and this makes me really happy when you have a combination of a potential lower cost base more economic help to local industries much better environmental footprint and more jobs for pilots these are all pluses in my book so auto aviation if you're watching this please let me get my hands on one of your aircraft i would love to try it out i'd love to do a proper evaluation video of this aircraft and i really hope that what you are promising will actually come to pass and that will see a completely new arm of the aviation business appearing in front of us our eyes do it in the next couple of years that's it guys that's that's what i had about the salera 500. what do you think about it please put your comments in the um well in the comments below and we can have a discussion about it the community metro aviation app and let's discuss it in there and by the way guys i am turning 39 i know next tuesday on 22nd of september and in order to celebrate that i have put on a 30 sale on all my merchandise for this weekend so for the next two days you will be able to get 30 off if you use the coupon code pilot 30 in my merch store i'm going to link to it up here so you can get this t-shirt or you can get a positive attitude t-shirt or maybe a team boeing team airbus team bombardier team engineering or anything or a nice cup of coffee okay so go and check out the merch store get yourself something at a 30 discount and i also want to send a huge thank you to my sponsor brilliant okay if you want to go in and you want to learn about math physics and maybe build your own algorithm in a fun and constructive way well then use the link here below you'll get a whopping 20 off the annual fee of brilliant or at least go and check it out that's all i ask from you have an absolutely fantastic day and i'll see you next time bye right guys i really hope that you liked that if you want more content like that more aviation content well then check this out uh i hope that you have subscribed to the channel and that you highlight the little notification bell see you inside of the mentor aviation app and have an absolutely fantastic day [Music] bye

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 481,341

Rating: 4.8819809 out of 5

Keywords: Otto Aviation, Otto Celera 500L, Bullet plane, Laminar flow, Aerodynamics, Worlds strangest aircraft, Mentour Pilot, Mentour Pilot Boeing 737, green aviation, sustainable aviation, Boeing 737, Boeing 737 MAX, Aviation news, Breaking news, Hoe to become a pilot, pilot news, pilot life, Nervous flyer, Aviation facts, Fear of flying, Fear of flying help, nervous flyer help, Boeing 787, Boeing 747, Airbus A320NEO, Airbus A380, New aviation, Financial news, new economy

Id: CN4EKZHYVaE

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/xjackfx]

Is there much of a market for this kind of ‘cheap entry level’ style private planes? With the world becoming more accessible via internet conferencing etc who is their market?