An Airplane with no Moving Parts

摘要

IN SCI-FI MOVIES, flight propulsion is almost never based on noisy, messy devices like propellers or turbojets. Our heroes scoot around in warp-driven starships or Millennium Falcons propelled by a silent, serene blue glow. It was that vision of a future aircraft that drew Steven Barrett, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the development of an electro-aerodynamic propulsion system that could sustain an aircraft in level flight. "It's not surprising that I was interested in science fiction as a kid," he says. He began studying the concept of a propulsion system based on ionic wind about nine years ago. Similar technologies were proposed in the 1920s and again in the '60s, but discarded each time as impractical.