Boeing is a legendary company within the aerospace industry. Boeing aircraft have carried packages, passengers, and ordnance all over the world for more than a hundred years.
Boeing is also a dinosaur. First incorporated in 1916, the company which became Boeing was founded only 13 years after the Wright brothers’ historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. When Boeing came about, aviation enthusiasts still had 11 years to wait before Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic.
There is something to be said for experience, especially in an industry as complex as aviation. Yet, it is also not that unusual for a highly accomplished company that has been around for a very long time to get complacent, and to rest on its laurels.
One bad quarter does not mean a company is destined for the scrapheap. Still, it has been a tough several months for Boeing, which recently reported a stunning $355 million loss in the first quarter of this year as well as an 8 percent year-over-year decline in revenue.
In January, there was a midair door blowout on a Boeing 737 Max 9. Though no one was seriously injured, federal regulators prohibited Boeing from ramping up its output as the company worked on quality control. Federal Aviation Administration officials subsequently found multiple problems in Boeing’s production quality procedures. All of this came just five years after the Boeing 737 Max was grounded worldwide in the wake of flight control issues which contributed to a pair of deadly plane crashes.
With Boeing having produced several of the best-selling commercial aircraft of all time, its recent stumbles could open up some valuable space in the marketplace for much smaller competitors. Aviation startups, seeking to improve upon aircraft designs that have not changed much in over half a century, are not wasting this opportunity.
One promising example is Long Beach-based JetZero. Largely subsumed in the news by Boeing’s woes, JetZero has been granted an airworthiness certificate by the FAA and is set to commence test flights with its 1:8 scale Pathfinder prototype, a “blended wing body” aircraft.
A blended wing body plane has increased volume in the middle section compared to the more traditional “tube and wing” design. Picture a B-2 stealth bomber with a civilian paint job and less military flare.
The blended wing body structure can carry the same amount of cargo or passengers as a tube and wing aircraft while burning 50 percent as much fuel, according to JetZero’s co-founder. NASA agrees that this design, by allowing the entire aircraft to generate lift as it simultaneously minimizes drag, “helps to increase fuel economy.”
Although the blended wing design has roots dating back to the 1920s, modern composite materials are far more capable than their predecessors of withstanding the constant expansion and contraction of a pressurized non-cylindrical fuselage. Airbus and even Boeing have tinkered with the idea of making their own blended wing aircraft, but with legacy aircraft manufacturers dealing with their own sets of problems at the moment, JetZero may be on track to beat them to market with its ambitious goal of placing commercial JetZero blended wing aircraft in the skies by 2030.
Another airspace startup seeking to capitalize on global efforts to reduce carbon emissions is Texas-based Aerolane. Aerolane’s ambitions are centered on technology that predates the advent of the airplane itself: gliders.
Aerolane claims that by towing high-tech gliders behind cargo planes, it can reduce fuel consumption by up to 65 percent. Though manned gliders proved themselves relatively safe in World War II (as much as anything flying through the air was safe in WWII), Aerolane’s focus on cargo-only gliders could help it achieve profitability faster than a passenger-based business model.
Legacy airplane manufacturers are stuck in a bit of a rut, and Boeing in particular has faced a wave of new setbacks. While this situation certainly generates understandable anxieties among the traveling public, who have few choices at the moment when it comes to aircraft manufacturers, it does leave the door open a crack for scrappy new companies. JetZero and Aerolane are among such innovative aerospace startups, and the next several years could be exciting ones for the aviation industry.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
