Radically new solutions for reducing the energy use by future aircraft and their operations

Abstract Nowadays, new developments of future aircraft focus on the electric and electric – hybrid aircraft, while features, especially the specific energy and thermal instability of the available accumulator technology cause serious problems. This paper aims to define, discuss, and evaluate how the radically new, so-called out-of-the-box solutions may improve energy efficiency, and reduce the energy consumptions of future aircraft and their operations. This study introduces a novel methodology for (i) evaluation of the energy efficiency, (ii) estimation of the possible energy consumption reduction, (iii) estimation of the used energy reductions. The practical part shortly describes the radically new technologies and solutions that can be applied for reducing the energy consumption of (iv) aircraft development, and (v) aircraft operations, including the ground and terminal operations, as well as discuss some results of two radically new concepts, namely maglev assisted take-off and landing and hybrid-electric aircraft with unconventional structural solutions. Among the developed out-of-the-box solutions, the required energy can be reduced significantly by the “undercarriage-less configuration concept”, and “electric UAV supporter concept” up to 21% and 10% respectively. In addition to this, the fuel burn can be reduced by 15–20% by the “Cruiser-Feeder Concept”.