At the Arkhip Lyulka Design Bureau, they started talking about the next step in the evolution of aviation – engines that operate not by reactive thrust, but through “field interaction.” General Designer Evgeny Marchukov directly admits that in the future, such installations may appear if a new physics of motion emerges.
“Pervyy Tekhnicheskiy” in its material tried to fantasize and imagine what kind of power plant will replace the gas turbine in the coming decades, or maybe even years.
The limit of the classical scheme
For decades, aviation has been developing the same idea – burn fuel, eject a jet, get thrust. Over 80 years, designers have brought it almost to perfection: the same Design Bureau created five generations of gas turbine engines.
But then a dead end begins. Increasing thrust runs into temperature, resource, and complexity. Even the most modern solutions, such as controlled thrust vectoring, are still a development of the old scheme, not its replacement.
The idea is in the air
Attempts to “bypass” jet thrust were made long before today. In the mid-20th century, engineers experimented with electrical and ionic effects, trying to obtain lift without mass ejection.
In the USA, such studies led to programs like Breakthrough Propulsion Physics under the auspices of NASA, where hypotheses of gravity and inertia control were studied. This did not yield practical results, but it showed that the idea itself is taken seriously at the level of fundamental science.
Similar searches were conducted in the USSR – though in classified topics. History already knows examples when a “crazy” theory first appeared, and then it became the norm.
Suffice it to recall how Valentin Glushko's work on liquid-propellant rocket engines first seemed like an experiment, and then took man into space.
What such an engine might look like
If we proceed from the logic of these searches, an anti-gravity engine will not resemble a conventional one at all. Nozzles will disappear, the flame will disappear, the very sound of the jet stream will disappear.
Instead, a compact power module will appear inside the fuselage, creating a directed field.
Flight control in this case turns not into “more gas – faster flight,” but into adjusting the interaction with the environment. The aircraft itself loses its dependence on air and aerodynamics – the shape becomes secondary.