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Look up at almost any airliner flying today, and you will see a design that has dominated commercial aviation for more than six decades.
A Montreal-based team is reportedly developing the Northgate N250 Borealis, a blended wing body airliner aiming to rethink commercial aircraft design for efficiency and comfort.
Key Takeaways
- The tube-and-wings design carries significant structural weight and fuel cost that a blended wing body could reduce.
- The Borealis is a serious but still unproven concept, with a flight demonstrator planned for 2028.
- Blended wing body designs have long been studied but have not yet entered commercial service, so technical and certification risks remain high.
What the video covers
- Most airliners use the decades-old tube-and-wings design, which carries structural weight needed to withstand cabin pressure.
- The Northgate N250 Borealis is a blended wing body concept where the whole aircraft generates lift, unlike a conventional fuselage.
- The project reportedly has $310 million in federal government support and is being developed near Montreal.
- A full-scale demonstrator is reportedly expected to fly over Quebec in spring 2028.
- The design claims efficiency gains from reduced structural weight, lower fuel burn, and a shorter-range or long-range 250-seat capacity.
- Three airlines have reportedly signed letters of intent, drawing interest from major manufacturers.
- The concept has been studied by NASA, Boeing, and Airbus for decades but never reached mainstream commercial service.
- Passenger cabin is described as wider and more comfortable, with more overhead storage and smoother pressurization.
- The project reportedly faced a near-fatal structural crack during pressure testing about 18 months ago, which led to a redesign.
- The narrative draws a connection to Canada's aerospace history, including the Avro Arrow cancellation and the Canadarm.
Chapters
- 00:00The Problem With the Tube-Shaped Airliner
- 00:42Introducing the Northgate N250 Borealis
- 03:09Why the Tube Design Is Inefficient
- 04:35The Blended Wing Body Concept
- 07:52Canada's Aerospace History and Engineering Legacy
- 10:54The Near-Failure in the Test Hangar
- 13:55Inside the Borealis Cabin
- 16:36Airline Interest and the Road Ahead
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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It is essentially a tube with wings. You squeeze through a narrow aisle, compete for overhead bin space, and sit with your knees pressed against the tray table in front of you.
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The cabin air can be so dry that your lips feel cracked before you even reach Winnipeg.
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Then there is the familiar fear of the passenger in front suddenly pushing their seat backward and sending your coffee toward your lap.
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That basic tube-shaped aircraft has ruled the sky since the 1960s. Almost every major aircraft manufacturer continues to use [music] it because the design is proven, predictable, and relatively straightforward to manufacture.
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But what if the tube was never the perfect shape in the first place? [music] What if a country better known for snow, hockey, and quiet engineering had developed something completely different?
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Imagine an aircraft capable of carrying 250 passengers from Vancouver to London while using half the fuel.
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Imagine giving every passenger enough overhead storage for a carry-on bag. Imagine a cabin designed around air pressure and circulation so comfortable that your ears barely notice the change in altitude.
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Imagine an aircraft that could land so smoothly, even during a prairie crosswind, that the usual feeling of motion sickness almost disappears.
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That aircraft is no longer just an idea on a piece of paper. [music] It is called the Northgate N250 Borealis, and it is reportedly being developed just outside Montreal.
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The federal government has reportedly put $310 million on the table to help move the project toward completion.
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The team behind it comes from the same Canadian aerospace industry that produced the Canadarm, the robotic arm that played an important role in building and servicing the International Space Station.
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And a full-scale [music] demonstrator is reportedly expected to fly over Quebec in the spring of 2028.
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Subscribe to Canada 2050 so you do not miss what happens next. Three airlines have already reportedly signed letters of intent, while the world's largest aircraft manufacturers, companies that have controlled commercial aviation for decades, are now watching Canada's project very closely.
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The Borealis is not being presented as simply another airplane with more efficient engines or more comfortable seats.
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The concept aims to rethink some of the basic rules of aircraft design, including how the aircraft creates lift, how it manages cabin pressure, how it handles the harsh conditions of a Canadian winter, and how efficiently it moves through the air.
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And the project almost never made it this far. 18 months ago, inside a test hangar in Quebec, something happened that reportedly came close to putting the entire program at risk.
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We will get to that moment. But before understanding why this Canadian aircraft could potentially challenge some of the industry's most established assumptions, you first need to understand the design trap that commercial aviation has been living with for roughly 60 [music] years.
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The tube that trapped the world. Think about the last time you flew out of Toronto Pearson.
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You walked into a long, narrow metal hallway with rows of seats placed along both sides.
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That basic structure is the fuselage. Boeing builds tubes. Airbus builds tubes. And for decades, the entire commercial aviation industry has built around essentially the same idea. Embraer builds tubes.
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Even many of the jets Canada has developed over the decades have followed the same basic shape.
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The design is so familiar that most people cannot imagine a commercial aircraft looking any other way.
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[music] But there is one number connected to the tube that almost no passenger ever hears about.
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Remember it, because it comes back at the end of this chapter and helps explain why the shape matters so much.
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First, there is the pressure problem. At 35,000 ft, the air outside an aircraft is extremely thin and can be colder than minus 50° C.
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To keep passengers alive and comfortable, the cabin has to maintain a much higher pressure than the surrounding atmosphere.
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That pressure pushes outward against the aircraft in every direction, constantly trying to expand the fuselage like a balloon.
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To prevent the tube from deforming or failing, engineers have to reinforce it with thick structural frames and ribs.
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All of that adds weight, even though much of the structure exists mainly to keep the pressurized shape intact.
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Then there is the problem of making the aircraft fly efficiently. A conventional tube does not create much useful lift.
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It is essentially weight suspended between two wings that perform most of the aerodynamic work.
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Those wings have to carry the entire fuselage along with 250 passengers, [music] their luggage, the fuel, and everything else on board.
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That creates enormous bending forces where the wings connect to the body. More stress requires more structural material.
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More material creates more weight. More weight requires more fuel. And more fuel ultimately means higher operating costs.
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Now, [music] here is the number worth remembering. According to the design analysis described by Northgate's engineers, [music] roughly one out of every 4 kg of structure in a conventional 250-seat long-range aircraft can be associated [music] with dealing with the weight and
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pressure demands of the tube itself. In other words, a significant amount of the aircraft structure is not directly carrying passengers or cargo.
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It is helping the tube support and contain itself. On a 5-hour flight from Vancouver to Halifax, passengers experience the consequences in other ways.
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There is one narrow aisle, a drink cart that can block it, and overhead bins that can fill up before half the passengers have even boarded.
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None of these problems are completely accidental. They are partly the result of trying to place hundreds of people inside a long, pressurized cylinder.
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For decades, aerospace engineers understood that there could be a more efficient way to arrange an aircraft.
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The problem was that nobody had found a practical way to build it at commercial scale.
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Then a team in Montreal stopped asking how to make a better tube and started asking a much more basic question. Why do we need the tube at all?
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The shape Canada built everything on. The Borealis looks unlike almost anything you would normally see at an airport.
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There is no conventional fuselage attached to two separate wings. Instead, the entire aircraft is designed as one broad, continuous shape.
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From a distance, [music] it can resemble a giant manta ray gliding through the sky.
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The concept is known as a blended wing body or BWB, and the basic idea is not new.
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NASA has tested blended wing concepts. Boeing has built wind tunnel models. Airbus has also studied similar designs and explored related concepts.
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Major aerospace companies around the world have examined the idea because of its potential efficiency advantages.
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Yet, despite decades of research, the concept has repeatedly remained outside mainstream commercial aviation. Canada has a history of pursuing aerospace ideas that were considered far ahead of their time.
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In 1959, Canada canceled the Avro Arrow, an advanced jet interceptor whose engineers later contributed to aerospace programs in the United States, including work connected to NASA. [music] For generations, Canadian engineers have wondered what might have happened if the
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country had continued developing the kind of ambitious aerospace technology. The Northgate team describes the Borealis as a form of unfinished business. [music] Here is why the shape could be so powerful.
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On the Borealis, the body itself is designed to generate lift. The wide, relatively flat center section functions much more like a wing than a traditional fuselage.
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Instead of having two relatively narrow wings carry almost the entire aircraft, much more of the aircraft's overall surface contributes to keeping it in the air.
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Engineers refer to this concept as span loading. Passengers, cargo, and fuel can be distributed across the full width of the lifting structure rather than being concentrated inside one narrow tube.
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That can reduce some of the bending forces acting on the aircraft structure. Less structural demand can mean less material, less weight, [music] and potentially lower fuel consumption.
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Northgate says the Borealis is designed to use roughly 50% less fuel than a conventional jet of similar size.
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For an airline flying the aircraft repeatedly on routes such as Toronto to Vancouver, that could represent a major reduction in fuel [music] use and operating costs, along with lower emissions.
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A claim of that size would naturally attract enormous attention from the aviation industry. [music] If the aircraft could deliver anything close to those efficiency gains in real-world service, airlines could have a powerful reason to consider the design.
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And conventional tube-shaped aircraft already on order could suddenly begin to look like technology from an earlier generation.
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But fuel efficiency is only one part of the story. [music] A conventional tube is tall and relatively narrow.
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The Borealis is designed to be much wider and shallower, and the difference changes almost everything about how the aircraft could work. And that extra width creates a cabin so different that Northgate's designers describe the interior in terms of rooms rather than
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rows. So, if this shape offers such major advantages, why did it take roughly 60 years for anyone to seriously attempt building [music] one?
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The answer is a problem that defeated nearly every company that explored the concept, [music] and Kalitta reportedly found a way around it that nobody expected.
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Chapter 4, overcoming engineering hurdles. Building something that should not be possible. The biggest obstacle facing the blended wing body was never simply how to make it fly.
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The real challenge was pressure. A round tube is naturally good at holding pressure, much like a soda can.
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A wide, flat surface is not. When air pressure pushes against a flat wall, the surface wants to bend outward like a balloon.
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The wider and flatter that surface becomes, the greater the problem gets. Every time engineers designed a broad open cabin, they discovered that reinforcing the walls made the structure so heavy that the aircraft lost many of the efficiency advantages the blended
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wing shape was supposed to provide. For decades, that single engineering problem kept the concept grounded.
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And 18 months ago, it reportedly came close to grounding the Borealis as well. This is the moment that was promised earlier.
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Northgate built its first full-size center section and sealed it inside a specialized test rig.
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Engineers began pumping air into the structure, raising the internal pressure beyond what the cabin would normally experience at 35,000 ft. [music] At 1 and 1/2 times the expected flight pressure, a flat section of the roof began to [music] bulge.
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Then a sharp crack echoed through the hangar. A split nearly a meter long appeared across the outer skin.
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The program was immediately frozen. Federal funding was reportedly placed on hold and two of the three airlines involved reportedly asked to withdraw their letters of intent.
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Inside Northgate, the situation became serious enough that some employees reportedly began packing up their desks.
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Chief engineer Claire Dubois gave the team 4 months to find a solution or the Borealis could become another ambitious Canadian aerospace project remembered as a dream that never made it out of the hangar.
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Then they found the answer. It came from two breakthroughs working together. The first involved the way the aircraft was [music] manufactured.
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Conventional carbon fiber aircraft components are often cured inside enormous pressure ovens known as autoclaves.
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These machines are extremely expensive and place limits on how large a single composite component can be.
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The Borealis takes a different approach and reportedly avoids the autoclave altogether. Its enormous center section is cured in open air inside a hangar north of Montreal using an advanced vacuum bagging process.
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That approach allows the central part of the aircraft to be [music] produced as one enormous, largely seamless structure.
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The material was also selected with Canada's extreme climate in mind. The carbon composite does not rust, does not absorb water in the same way traditional materials can, and is designed to remain stable through major temperature changes from a minus 40°
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winter morning in Edmonton to a plus 30° summer afternoon on the tarmac in Kelowna.
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But the second breakthrough was the one that reportedly saved the program. Engineers developed a network of tensile pillars inside the cabin.
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These structural supports run between the floor and ceiling, connecting the upper and lower surfaces so the wide cabin cannot simply expand outward under pressure at cruising altitude.
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But here is the clever part. Passengers would not be looking at ugly support columns standing in the middle of the cabin.
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The pillars are integrated directly into the interior design. They form walls between different sections, provide structural frames around the overhead storage areas, and divide the enormous open space into more natural zones.
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That also helps solve a problem designers sometimes describe as the bowling alley effect, the closed-in feeling that can happen when a space is extremely wide but relatively low.
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By using the structural supports to create separate areas, the Borealis can potentially feel less like a giant warehouse and more like a spacious, comfortable lounge.
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Are there trade-offs? Absolutely. The pillars occupy a small amount of usable floor space. But the designers appear to consider that a reasonable price for making the unusual cabin structure practical.
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For months after the original crack appeared, the redesigned center section went back into the same pressure test rig.
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The team pushed it to 1 and 1/2 times normal flight pressure and then increased the load to twice flight pressure.
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This time, not a single panel moved. The federal funding reportedly returned. [music] The airlines came back.
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And this time, they reportedly brought additional interest with them. With the shape finally unlocked and the structure holding firm, the next question became much simpler.
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What do you actually do with all that extra space? The answer surprised even some of the airlines.
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A cabin designed to feel more like a flying lounge. Step inside the Borealis, and the first thing you notice is what is missing.
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There is no single narrow aisle running from the front to the back. Chapter 5, inside the flying lounge.
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There are four aisles, each designed to be wide enough for two people to pass comfortably. The drink cart no longer traps passengers in place, and even the kitchens are arranged differently.
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Instead of squeezing a single galley into the rear of the aircraft, the Borealis uses central galley islands where crews can prepare and distribute meals more efficiently across the cabin.
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Instead of two cramped restroom areas at the back, there are larger restroom clusters designed more like the facilities you might find inside a modern airport lounge.
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There is enough room to turn around without feeling trapped. Then there is the ceiling.
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On a conventional jet, the ceiling curves downward toward the windows, which can make the outer seats feel even more confined.
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On the Borealis, the ceiling is designed to remain flat across the main cabin. Stand up beside the window and, in theory, you simply stand up without having to duck underneath the curve.
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The climate system is also designed to provide more precise control. On a normal aircraft, different parts of the cabin can feel noticeably warmer or colder, with passengers near one area feeling comfortable while another section feels too cold or too warm.
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The Borealis uses multi-zone climate control, allowing different sections of the cabin to be managed more precisely.
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But the feature that reportedly caught the airlines' attention before almost anything else was not the aisles or the bathrooms.
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It was the overhead storage. That flat ceiling creates room for much larger overhead bins.
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The design target is a one-to-one ratio, meaning every passenger would have a dedicated space for a carry-on bag.
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And in true Canadian fashion, each compartment is designed to hold not only a carry-on, but also a full winter parka.
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No more trying to squeeze your heavy coat under your seat in January. No more standing at the boarding gate wondering whether there will be enough bin space when you finally get on the aircraft.
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You sit down, place your bag above you, and relax. [music] If you enjoy stories like this, hit the like button.
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It helps Canada 2050 more than you might realize. And if you have ever wondered how close the things around you might be to being replaced, and who gets to decide when that happens, our ebook explores that question.
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The link is in the description. Within weeks of the first cabin mock-up being shown, airlines from Europe and Asia had reportedly sent teams to Montreal to examine the concept.
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One of the world's largest aircraft manufacturers also reportedly reopened its own studies into flying wing designs, research that had previously been shelved.
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But what passengers see inside the Borealis is only half of the story. The outside of the aircraft hides another set of engineering ideas designed for environments where conventional jets can face some serious challenges.
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The secrets hiding on the outside. Chapter
Topics:Northgate N250 Borealisblended wing bodyCanadian aerospacefuture aircraft designcommercial aviationtube and wingsaircraft efficiencyMontreal aerospaceBWBaviation innovation
