Twin-fuselage Airbus Airliner
 

This combination is new, although I do not see anything truly new here.

• forward swept wings -> less drag
• central pusher-> inline thrust
• forward lifting plane does away with opposing tail plane -> less drag
• single level seating-> faster boarding and evacuation
• prop fans -> higher efficiency propulsion
• dual fuselages & greater fineness ratio-> less drag
• more total fuselage skin -> higher wetted surface -> more drag
• off-center cockpit-> approaches & landings more difficult
• long wheel spacing -> wider turn radius
• engines away from cabin -> quieter
• tubular fuselages- lower manufacturing costs, redundant parts
• propfans located in dirty air-> noisy
• split fuselage config -> more complex ramp ops, dual jetways, fueling issues, etc.
• lighter wing spars-> less weight

I like this airplane for being forward thinking but it's a bit ambitious.
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Airbus Unveils Double Fuselage Design

(Flying, 6/27, B. Whitfield) A recent patent awarded to Airbus by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office indicates engineers at the industry giant have quite a unique design up their sleeves – a double fuselage airliner, to be exact. Design drawings associated with the patent, filed in 2008, show the fuselages connected by way of two forward-swept wings, with the front wing positioned lower than the rear upper wing. This configuration creates a particularly strong structure that can weather bending moments, allowing for a lighter weight aircraft and thus, potential fuel savings. Lying centered amidst the aft wing in a longitudinal plane is the turboprop propulsion system, another key element of the aircraft’s potential for significantly decreased fuel requirements. The authors of the patent request maintain the new structure is an answer to an earlier twin fuselage design put forth and patented more than 30 years ago by Boeing, which featured a lower forward straight wing and a very high straight aft wing connecting the dual cabins. According to Airbus, the new design’s swept wing configuration solves the excessive height challenge and high CG position featured in the Boeing design. Whether the Airbus design will make more headway in the near future than that of Boeing’s undeveloped configuration is yet to be seen...

Observations from the p-nut gallery.

Aren't forward swept wings (X-29) inherently unstable? FBW is the norm so that's kind of moot.

How do you think the F/As (or pax) in the "other" side feel about the isolation? Are there issues there - security, communication, etc.

How can I keep the kid in the other fuselage from flipping me off?

New, higher Seating fees - "yes your family can sit together"

and just HOW wide does the runway have to be to accommodate these ugly POS

That just made me giggle.

This was probably created to solve the challenges associated with mounting an open rotor on a traditional airplane. Open rotors combined with bleeding-edge engine core technology appear to offer very significant fuel efficiency improvements (which in turn makes emissions goals easier to achieve since you burn fewer dinosuars).

An open rotor is too large to fit under the wing, even a high-wing would need to be on stilts and then you have FOD issues. If you mount them on the rear (like the original MD-80 test platform) a fan failure will likely take out the OTHER engine as well as whatever equipment is in the tail bay, and maybe the verticial stab/rudder too.

This design keeps a fan failure from getting the other engine or vertical stab/rudder. You can simply armor the sections of fuselage adjacent to the fans. Not sure about how you keep a failed front fan out of the rear fans though.

FBW has solved that, all modern fighters are highly unstable, most of them would tumble out of control if a human was in direct control of the control surfaces.

Not really different than the way it is now with the cockpit door shut. You could even put "higher security risk" pax in the other hull to prevent cockpit access!

It would be a weird feeling trying to land it on the centerline while sitting close to the runway edge.

A lot of these things are really designed to just hold patents, though, aren't they?

No worries, this machine is not even remotely likely to get made. Airplane companies have their R&D departments come up proposals crazier than this every day. There could be any number of purposes for making a patent application, maybe it's misdirection from a more significant alternative, or maybe it is protection for something hidden in the design detail. Hard to know.

what a dumb idea

Looks like something Burt Rutan might have dreamed up. He is not a prisoner of conventional thinking. :)