Efficient revolutionary egg shape plane

The unusual egg shape helps it travel more miles on a single tank of gas

The following written content from Preston Lerner

Sky watchers in the windswept high desert town of Victorville, California, have seen a dazzling array of airplanes over the past 80 years, from the fighters and bombers that flew into the local airfield when it was George Air Force Base to hundreds of about-to-be-mothballed airliners after the former military installation became the Southern California Logistics Airport. But they’ve never seen anything like the Celera 500L. Nobody has.

Shaped like an elongated egg with wings and a stubby propeller hanging off the tail, the 500L is designed to leverage the benefits of laminar flow—an aerodynamic advantage that increases efficiency in flight by minimizing drag—to an extent never before seen in a production airplane. At the moment, the prototype is collecting flight data to see just how well extremely low drag across an entire airframe will translate into performance.

Former Canadian astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason, a veteran of space shuttle mission STS-85, is at the controls as the prototype effortlessly gains altitude. For this test hop, Tryggvason plans to cruise at a sedate pace—maybe 250 miles per hour—while Len Fox, flying chase in a sleek twin-engine Piper Navajo, collects infrared images of the Celera. Tryggvason is loping along, barely using half the power at his disposal. So he’s surprised to hear Fox’s voice on the radio, sounding perturbed.

“Can you slow down some?” Fox says. “I can’t keep up with you.”

The Navajo might not be the only airplane left behind. Otto Aviation, the southern California startup behind the new Celera, is promising new standards for speed, range, and fuel economy that would trounce rivals like the turboprop Pilatus PC-12 and the twin-engine Beechcraft King Air, while stacking up favorably with business jets. The relevant numbers? A cruise speed of 460 mph at 50,000 feet, with a range of 4,500 nautical miles. And, the company claims, it will be five times more cost-effective and eight times more fuel-efficient than bizjets with comparable performance, thanks to the super-smooth laminar flow surfaces, high-aspect-ratio wings, and an innovative, lightweight V-12 diesel engine. It’s more efficient than other turboprops too.

“In the classic [turboprop] airplane world, you’re scrubbing for half-a-percent improvement here or there,” says Otto Aviation chief technical officer David Bogue, who began his career at Boeing working on the 737-700. “With this aircraft here, we’re looking at a 400 percent improvement. It’s just fantastic!”

The Celera 500L has been likened to a blimp, a World War II drop tank, and a bloated version of the Bell X-1 that Chuck Yeager flew through the sound barrier. But on one point, almost everybody agrees: The airplane sounds too good to be true. “I want to believe, but it sounds like a tall order,” says Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis for Teal Group. “Getting something airborne is the easy part. But getting something certified is a long process that inevitably results in changes, which, of course, can impair ambitious performance goals.”

For critics, the Celera 500L is weighed down by another piece of baggage. Its creator, Bill Otto, isn’t even an aeronautical engineer. In fact, this is the first airplane he’s ever designed. But he doesn’t see his lack of experience as a drawback. On the contrary, he says, his outsider’s perspective is precisely what allowed him to seize on laminar flow and follow it to its logical conclusion.

“Engineers tend to look at what has been done and see how that can be applied,” Otto says. “My approach is not to do that. It’s to figure out what has to be done to satisfy the requirements and then do that unless it’s prohibited by something that has gone before.” He’s equally dismissive when asked why nobody ever tried to put a laminar-flow airplane into production even though the advantages have been obvious for decades. “Well,” he says, “I think the real reason was that they were selling all the tin they could bend, so why bother?”

A plainspoken, 77-year-old Texan now living in southern California, Otto has always gone his own way. After working briefly as a research scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he hired on at North American Aviation and was assigned to a variety of projects—a guidance system for the Minuteman missile, an inertial navigation system for the Navy’s A3J attack bomber (which became the A-5 Vigilante), and a Navy torpedo. When he was named chief scientist of the B-1A avionics study program (North American had become part of Rockwell by that time), he bailed from the company because he thought—correctly, as it turned out—that the airplane was a dud.

Before long, he was traveling regularly around the world as an accident reconstruction analyst called on to testify as an expert witness. One of his trips required a helicopter hop, two airline legs to cross the continent, and a long drive in a rental car. When he finally reached the accident site, he realized there was a small airfield nearby.

“I decided that this was nonsense,” he recalls. “When I came home, I said to my partner, ‘How about we buy a plane and just fly direct?’ We started doing some investigating. What we found was that we could buy a general aviation aircraft and fly slow for 500 miles, stop and refuel, or we could buy a retired military aircraft and fly fast for 500 miles, then stop and refuel. Neither one of them made any economic sense. Well, I got curious. Why is it that general aviation aircraft are so horribly inefficient? What I discovered was that our torpedo research at North American might have some applications.”

During the mid-1960s, while working on torpedoes for the Navy, Otto helped with an unconventional design called the “Dolphin,” its shape inspired by an airfoil developed by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics—NASA’s predecessor—to minimize drag by taking advantage of the aerodynamic principle of laminar flow. After numerous tests, the Navy passed on the torpedo. But not because it failed to deliver. In fact, it was just the opposite, according to a paper published nearly a half-century later in the Journal of Hydronautics.

“A significant drag reduction was noted,” the authors wrote, “the Dolphin having half the drag of a conventional torpedo [under similar conditions]. The low drag was achieved primarily by the Dolphin’s ability to maintain a long run of laminar boundary layer.” Read more from Airspacemag