Modular Aircraft

For years, cargo aircraft have been loaded and unloaded through huge doors:

This is a Lockheed C-5B, clearly showing how the nose swings up to give access to the whole interior. You could drive a truck right in there! Or a tank -- which is the whole idea.

There's also a version of the 747 that works like this (see photo below). In fact, the original 747 prototype was actually a design proposal for the same contract that Lockheed won and under which the C-5 was built (or so I have read).

Anyway, I don't understand why this idea has never been applied to passenger aircraft. Build an aircraft interior with no real structure to it -- just enough to keep it from falling apart. At the airport, the interior is filled with those yummy sandwiches, the magic blue water in the toilets, and luggage. All the passengers climb into this thing, sit down, and fasten their seat belts.

The aircraft, which arrived a few minutes earlier, has its interior pulled out of it in one piece by some big machine, and the new interior -- with luggage, food, and departing passengers already in it -- is stuffed in. The plane can turn around in no more time than it takes to refuel and to do whatever mechanical checks they do.

The arriving passengers all get out of the interior, while baggage handlers are pulling their luggage out of the space under the seats. While this is going on, the aircraft itself is already taxiing out to the runway again.

All of this would require rebuilding airports' terminal areas to an extent -- my idea is that the aircraft interiors are pulled right into the airport, with space underneath for the baggage people and the convenience, up above, of stepping right out of the plane and into the terminal -- but airports will have to be rethought anyway in the coming years for these giant new aircraft that Airbus and Boeing are threatening us with.

I imagine that the airlines and the aircraft manufacturers have considered this solution before; it's too obvious for them not to have done. The main problem is probably weight; in my scheme, the interior would have to be self-supporting, rather than just bolted and stuck onto the fuselage as it is now. And not only would the interior weigh more, but the pulleys, gears, and levers needed to get the thing in and out of the aircraft would be heavy, too.

(After originally writing this, I found out that it costs a lot less than I thought to lease commercial passenger aircraft. I thought that it was something like $75 a minute, when it turns out to be a lot more like $75 an hour -- which explains why they don't mind letting the things sit around on the ground for so long.)

As materials get lighter and aircraft get bigger and more expensive -- meaning that they'll take longer to load and unload, and cost more while they're sitting there being loaded and unloaded -- I predict that my idea will find a use. Just remember that you saw it here first.