Originally published at: Otto Aerospace Touts AI Aircraft Design Tool - AVweb
Otto Aerospace leverages AI aircraft design in attempt to cut design time, enhance efficiency and lower emissions.
The AI generated video is really cool looking but the reality is that maintaining laminar flow over large aircraft surfaces at speeds in excess of 200 mph is extremely difficult even without windows in the aircraft. The the science and engineering on this topic has been well established for years and without active boundary layer control systems it is not practical. Even with them it is cost prohibitive. If you don’t want to do the research, at least do a little critical thinking here. The airlines go nuts if they can save 5% on their fuel costs. If an aircraft manufacturer could build an airliner that would save double that they would dominate the industry and sell planes faster than they could build them. Also note that the Celera 500 fell far short of its performance goals and never came close to being certified. I don’t know why I am even bothering to write this. Few people these days care about science, engineering, and facts.
Agree completely… thank you for adding science based sanity.
I guess I was wrong, some people do care about science, engineering, and facts. Thank you sir for your comment.
If people have stopped caring about science, engineering and facts, it may be because of what passes for S, E & F these days. The internet was supposed to be the information highway that would bring information to all people, elevating the knowledge of humans to unprecedented levels. Sadly, it wasn’t designed to distribute only valid and true information, nor is there any way for the novice to detect fact from fiction. Add in the human tendency to get an ego boost from publicly showing that they are informed and therefore above reproach and the pretended competence emerges, protected by the anonymity inherent in the internet. Thus one can pretend to be an expert for a while, dispensing techno-nonsense to people who can’t discern its fallacies and swallow it up—hook, line and sinker—then disappear when someone reveals them to be a fraud and reappear under a new alias for round two, three, four, … that ego boost can be addictive.
If the books and magazines that substantially helped educate me in various aspects of aviation in my youth were similarly lacking in assumable authenticity and validity I can’t imagine what I would have done or become. The human brain has no capacity to deliberately forget anything and deliberately educating others (especially young enthusiasts) with false information to pretend competence for an ego boost should be criminal.
That is why I dread the growing reliance on AI to perform safety/reliability-sensitive work… who knows what info it was raised on or what it will feed itself when it matures. Tasking humans to keep an eye on it won’t work just as it hasn’t worked for monitoring autonomous vehicles. Humans don’t take kindly to just watching someone or something do anything, especially if the performance is generally excellent; they read a book while the car drives into pedestrians or fall asleep while the autopilot flies the airplane past the destination.
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