Airbus shielded engines patent

[Arjen]

Airbus shielded engine configuration spotted on Aviation Week's Leading Edge blog.

The second Airbus patent (8,152,095, applied for in 2008) is for an "aircraft having a reduced acoustic signature", particularly for operations from runways in noise-sensitive urban environments. The configuration is designed to maximize airframe shielding of propulsion noise. The engines are mounted together atop the aft fuselage in an extended nacelle so the shared inlet is above the wing, forward of the trailing edge, shielding fan noise, while the exhaust is between the twin vertical tails and forward of the aft end of the fuselage, shielding jet noise.To improve aerodynamic integration and noise shielding, the engines are sunk into the fuselage by about 10-30% of their diameter. In this and other respects, Airbus' configuration resembles MIT's D Series "double-bubble" airliner concept with its boundary-layer-ingesting, wake-re-energizing integrated engines and Pi-tail.