Thread: The largest plane ever built, but will it fly?

That's quite large... 😁 Boasting a takeoff weight around the 600 tonne mark is staggering...

Will be interesting to see it fly. It doesn't look strong enough between the two hulls to support the loads that will be placed on it, but I'm sure the Engineers know what they are doing.

Rutan is a competent and experienced designer - I have no doubt it will fly. It suffers from one major issue - how many airfields can accommodate something that size?

The airfields that accommodate the space shuttle, I guess. After all, it is not a commuter aircraft.

The space shuttle could use quite a few airfields - especially in an emergency where pavement damage was acceptable. (This was discussed in a well researched novel "Shuttle Down", can't remember the author, quite a few years ago, which canvassed an emergency shuttle landing on Easter Island . There was no major issue landing it, but with the thing stuck on the runway, preventing anything else landing, and nothing on the island capable of towing it off, where do you go from there?)

The relevant issue here is probably width, including main gear track width. I don't expect its takeoff distance would be extreme, compared, for example to a 747 at MTOW, and it would normally land very light and hence short.

Originally Posted by JDNSW

Rutan is a competent and experienced designer - I have no doubt it will fly. It suffers from one major issue - how many airfields can accommodate something that size?

I remember talking to a bloke I knew many years ago who was an ex-RAF fighter pilot and test pilot.
He really didn't like Bert Rutan's early designs, the Vari-eze and Long-eze

Despite some misgivings about some of his designs, the company, Scaled Composites, has for decades been the goto company for special designs. Unless the requesting bill payer poked their nose into the design excessively, I have no doubt it will fly.

As an aside, people have been questioning "will it fly" every time an unusually large aircraft was built, from Sikorsky's "Le Grande" in 1914, to the Zeppelin Staarken of 1916, to the Dornier Do X, to the Maxim Gorki, to all the subsequent large aircraft.

And they have all flown, admittedly, some of them not very well!

The space shuttle weighs less than 80 tonnes. A bit more than a 737. It’s the wing and associated higher approach speeds that drive the landing distance up.

Most of the airports that take an A380 needed infrastructure works to be able to cover the wingspan when manoeuvring on the ramp, moreso than runway works to cover its weight.

The A380 can operate out of a 45m wide runway. Can this thing?

Doubt it.

So do I!