Hey, it’s been a while! I thought I should send something out about why there’s been such a long gap since my last piece. This originally started as an intro to the next ‘proper’ post, but with both growing rather lengthy, it seemed better to separate things out.
As those of you that follow me on Twitter may’ve seen, I burned out pretty hard a couple of months back. There’s a host of reasons behind this, as there always is, but a lot of it relates to the uncertainty and isolation of working on climate projects. I’ve been lucky enough to work full time on climate projects of one sort or another for the past 2 and a half years. It’s been an amazing experience, but hard, both financially and mentally (even leaving aside the craziness of the past 18+ months!).
I wanted to revisit the origins of this project, explain why things fell apart more recently, and what hopefully lies ahead for it in the future.
A quick recap
Researching and investigating clean aviation for so long has been, as Bob Ross would put it, “A happy little accident”. I began looking into the area as part of what I hoped would become a series of deep dives into various sectors and their climate impacts and decarbonisation potential. However, I just couldn’t leave aviation alone, particularly the blended wing body (BWB) concept.
As a result of this rather accidental path into this area, I’ve never had a clear end goal. Initially, I just wanted to find and highlight interesting environmental efforts in aviation, but upon finding a nearly complete lack of commercial work on BWBs, I ended up being drawn into figuring out why virtually no designs had made it off the drawing board, and whether there were fundamental barriers to their adoption.
What I found surprised me – whilst there were plenty of potential issues and risks to understand and overcome, none of them were deal-breakers. Rather, it appeared to be more the case that momentum – of the major manufacturers, of regulators, of the industry as a whole – made trying truly novel ideas extremely difficult, expensive and risky.
However, techniques from the software and startup world, embracing rapid testing and iteration seem like they could break this impasse, lowering the risk, timescale and cost of trying novel ideas. SpaceX is arguably pursuing a similar approach with its Starship program. Whatever you think of the company, its founder or goals, the speed at which they’ve progressed in development of innovative rocketry is an order of magnitude different from the legacy space industry.
An idea begins to form
As a result of this admittedly naive thought process, I decided to embark on trying to make BWB aircraft a reality (or at least definitively rule them out), using first principles thinking and a lot of research in an attempt to compensate for my lack of any traditional aerospace expertise. I tried not to think about how I was going to make this financially viable – a problem for future me!
I’ve now been working on this project to this end for slightly over a year now, and it’s not been a particularly easy journey. Working alone in a very complex field on an idea of this scope has been tricky, even leaving aside minor events like the COVID-19 pandemic that has upended so much of normal life over the past 18 months or more. I’ve had my fair share of doubts about whether this is the right area for me to work on, as well as where the project could and should lead, and that plus other life stresses combined to lead me to burn out fairly hard earlier this year.
Dark times
I seriously contemplated giving up on this project entirely, but I could never quite get it out of my head, even in the darkest parts of the past six months. I still believe there’s serious promise somewhere in the blended-wing body concept, and the idea of working on it still gets me really excited – it’s basically a dream come true (bar the whole ‘no income’ thing)!
What took a knock was my confidence – I lost belief in my ability to make any meaningful change in this immensely complex and highly regulated arena. That’s not really something I can avoid – it is extremely difficult, and I am not the best qualified, as I’ve known from the start. However, ultimately, I am here, I’m motivated, willing and able to work on this, so why not at least give it a shot?
Scale and scope
Designing and potentially manufacturing aircraft is a vast endeavour, no matter the context. Investors and entrepreneurs in the space quote figures in the billions of dollars and timescales of decades to get new aircraft to market, and that’s for conventional planform, low capacity designs.
Taking on the behemoths of the commercial aviation industry with a novel design is even more challenging, and balancing that against the current reality of little ol’ me, working alone with minimal resources produced... some dissonance. I often found myself skipping from micro to macro and back, unsure where to focus. Progress was slow, with many false starts, and although I built up a good base of knowledge along the way, I don’t have a huge amount to show for my first 9 months or so of work.
Onwards and (hopefully) upwards
So, we’re caught up again, and I’m now looking forward to the future, having (mostly) recovered from burnout. The project still excites me, and I’m hoping with more focus, I can make progress without being overwhelmed with its patently ridiculous scale and ambition. The process thus far has involved simplifying again and again, to bring some form of MVP within the reach of one person. Much of my work to now has been figuring out processes and tools – building up the framework within which I can start testing out designs.
That work is progressing well so far, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to write up some of how I’m approaching the process soon, as I’d love to get some feedback and thoughts on how I’m looking at this problem. I’m still finding it easy to get overwhelmed with complexity, but this time around I’m much more mindful of actively managing this side of things.
In the meantime, I’ve got plenty of other ideas for posts on the decarbonisation of aviation kicking around, and I’d like to start writing a few of those up fairly soon. I’ve got a rough draft of what could be an interesting dive into the future direction of the aviation industry, so expect that in the not-too-distant future. That being said, I’m definitely still not running back at full speed just yet, so updates here may be a little sporadic for a while. Thanks for bearing with, and see you in the next one!
Oli
Welcome back, I missed this :)