Visions of future flying machines: a 200 mile high club, a zero G bridal suite…

How about a zero G bridal suite in earth orbit,  or an inter-city tilt rotor aircraft with room for thousands of commuters? These are among the latest visions of future flying machines by the Yelken Octuri design studio, based in Airbus City, also known as Toulouse.

Octuri design concepts extending beyond airliners have been shown in various public exhibitions in recent years, and received wide acclaim in architectural and transport industry literature.

However the current collection of concepts include one that might excite Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic rocket rides venture, which should become a reality later this decade, except that this is for orbital honeymoons, somewhat further into the future.

What is unsubtly liveried as the HorneyMoon space lifter would serve the naked ambitions of  the 200 mile high club, and that needs at least a few earth orbits to be fully enjoyed, not five minutes of zero G, however exciting this will be atop a Virgin fire cracker.

The HorneyMoon space lifter, a single stage runway-to-orbit rocketliner,  would release a set of pods which become, in this mission, zero G bridal suites, which drop back from space in a 5 G fireball re-entry for a splash down for retrieval from the ocean by a ship using a crane.  It has everything a honeymoon couple could want, apart from the inside-a-gigantic-burning- canon-ball-passion-killer bit at the end.

Other concepts, which can be explored on this website, include an incredible yet perhaps one day feasible flying yacht. After the end of World War II there were some privately owned Catalina flying boats that were rigged to allow sails to be raised for navigating slowly around lakes. In the Octuri vision the wings become the sails. Aeronautical engineers would nominate a book full of reasons why this will not work today, however, in a world where energy can be downloaded from a spectrum unknown to physics today, and used to drive rotors and lift structures made of materials not known today, it could work.

As could the smaller insect like sailing light aircraft.

Such engine-energy technological breakthroughs would also be crucial to Octuri’s vision of a City Plane, a multi level flying machine which appears have the capacity of a spectator stand at a sports stadium, or at least several thousand people seated if not strap hanging commuter style, and which would dock into slots atop high towers, rather than use conventional arrival and departure slots at conventional airports.

The towers would be located right among the future high rise aggregations of city centres, thus eliminating conventional airport transfers, even though the backdrop to these graphics is Hamburg, which can be reached by the S-bahn from the airport in about 25 minutes for around  €2.80 each way, Sydney eat your heart out!

The engines on the City Plane are tilt-rotors, and lots of them, which is very wise on the part of the designer given the known problems of engine failures in large twin engined tilt rotors  including the Osprey, a somewhat lethal machine in such situations.  Again, this design looks promising if the energy doesn’t come from fuel tanks, but wirelessly, from the ether.

Don’t mock wireless usable (non-destructive) energy. Thirty years ago no-one outside esoteric research laboratories envisaged the energy charged spectrums that fill supposedly empty space. It doesn’t exist for us today, but limitless energy fills the unseen environment, waiting to be understood and tamed, and applied to transports of delight exceeding even the concepts seen in Octuri’s visionary flying machines.