THE END OF THE TUBE, MAYBE

A chill mist filters the light of a low, weak February sun. In the fields, the wool of grazing sheep is damp and bedraggled. The English country lanes and villages all look the same, and I think I'm lost. But suddenly there is a gantry of bright lights—runway approach lights—and I know I'm close to my destination. It occurs to me how surprising it is that in England, a densely populated country, and here in Bedfordshire, a county I know very well, only 40 miles north of London, it's still possible to construct an airfield virtually out of sight to anyone who is not actually looking for it. Hidden in plain sight? Certainly, few people have heard of Cranfield.

My journey here began months earlier, 6,000 miles away in Seattle. I had been talking to a number of the best minds in the Boeing company about their effort to clean up the skies. One idea that Boeing—and its European rivals at Airbus—were looking at was how the shape of the airliner itself could become more benign and, in the process, guzzle a lot less fuel. In fact, Boeing was doing more than looking; the company was flight testing an unmanned 21-foot-wingspan prototype called the X-48B at Edwards Air Force Base in California, legendary locus of the "right stuff" pilots. The X?48B looks like a streamlined bat. It has no conventional fuselage; it's almost all wing, in a form that is called a blended wing; and it does suggest that somebody put a conventional aircraft in a blender and got rid of everything superfluous to elegance, the kind of elegance that not only attracts the eye but all the virtues of physics, a shape that slips through the air with exemplary efficiency.

The Boeing people were cagey about this venture. They wouldn't let me go to Edwards and indulge my inner Chuck Yeager. The tests were in the hands of an outfit the company calls its Phantom Works, and the flying was being done remotely from the ground by a former top gun pilot. I could tell that it was all a bit racy and otherworldly to the engineers in Seattle, whose more immediate concerns were how to figure out what we might be flying in 2020 (already close by their disciplines) rather than 2030. So, leaving Seattle, I decided to track down the brains behind the X-48B, which turned out to be a company called Cranfield Aerospace—apparently the only company ever to sell a complete airplane concept to Boeing.

The appearance and amenities of Cranfield Aerospace don't suggest corporate profligacy. I find them among a cluster of hangars and ramshackle quarters in a building originally created for the Royal Air Force in 1936, when the handful of pilots who would save Britain in the summer of 1940 were just beginning to be recruited and trained. "Reception" is little more than a door. I press a buzzer. A voice answers: "Ah, you want the prof," and in a minute or so a guy appears, wearing Lindbergh-like overalls. He has clearly been working at a somewhat messy hands-on craft.