Oh, Your Private Jet Is Just Subsonic?

zerogeewhiz writes "Found this article here at The Sydney Morning Herald . It seems that Bill and his mates need to move a bit quicker these days and for a cool US$80 million, you too can overtake the Concorde on a dash to Harrods for dinner. As described in the article, the main complaint about Concorde is that it can only fly supersonic over water and creates those nasty sonic booms that punch holes in buildings and shatter windows. They reckon they can get rid of these waves by making the plane longer. These are gonna be fast but hideous. 737-700s are suddenly passe as a corporate jet..."

Comments

Extending Length to PREVENT Sonic Booms?

[Rura Penthe]

I'm somewhat confused on this count. Would extending the length of a plane actually prevent a sonic boom? According to Britannica : "If the aircraft is especially long, double sonic booms might be detected, one emanating from the leading edge of the plane and one from the trailing edge."

Has new technology been developed with regards to this?

Concorde Avionics (or lack thereof)

[green pizza]

Have you seen a photograph of a Concorde cockpit? It looks like something straight out of a 707, it's ancient. There's not an LCD, CRT, or even an LED to be seen. The typical "flight computer" is usually the pilot's own handheld PDA, ditto for GPS. If I were going to pay $big for private use of a Concorde, it by gosh better have some real avionics.

Even the B-52H has a nice modernized cockpit with screens galore. If that old clunker can be up to date, there's no reason why a Concorde can't.

For this kind of money...

[Waffle Iron]

... I bet that you could put together a teleconferencing system with close to IMAX quality. It would use a lot less fuel, too.

A dedicated 100-Mb fiber link should be sufficient. Imagine hardball business negotiations in 9-channel Dolby surround sound.

What happened to "Getting there is half the fun"?

[Robber Baron]

Some of the my most memorable journeys have been long train trips. So what if it takes you three days to travel coast to coast? You get to relax, get up, walk around, meet some of your fellow travellers...it's great fun and a hell of a lot more civilized than being strapped into a supersonic missile like so many Aztec sacrifices...

Besides, you know how much we get pissed-off when some Yuppie asshole's cell-phone starts ringing when we are trying to enjoy a nice restaurant or theatre performance? "Look at me! I'm so fucking important that I need to disturb everyone around me!" Well that's just going to get a whole lot worse. "Look at me! I'm so fucking important that I need to smash out everyone's windows as I race off to yet another "important" meeting!"

Anyone know where I can get a Patriot missile battery cheap?

Sloppy Reporting

[hanway]

Concorde is "the world's dirtiest and loudest aircraft?" That's pretty sloppy reporting. It's probably true for commercial airliners, but there are probably many military planes that are louder and belch more smoke. I'll bet that the B-52 is dirtier and the SR-71 is louder.

Eye Candy

[Kozz]

Take a look at a photo of a sonic boom.

And for the record, the Lameness filter sucks.

Re:Eye Candy

[Fishstick]

>This isn't necessarily a picture of a sonic boom

You are probably technically correct, but in this case, the photographer took this picture at the exact instant the sonic boom happened:

Through the viewfinder of his camera, Ensign John Gay could see the A/F18 drop from the sky as it headed toward the port side of the Aircraft Carrier Constellation at 1,000 feet. The pilot increases his speed to 750 mph, vapor flickering off the curved surfaces of the plane. At the precise moment of breaking the sound barrier, 200 yards form the carrier, a circular cloud formed arourd the Hornet. With the Pacific Ocean just 75 feet below the aircraft being rippled by the aircraft's pass, Gay hears the explosion of the sonic boom and snaped his camera shutter once. "I clicked the same time I heard the boom and I knew I had it." What he had was a technically meticulous depiction of the sound barrier being broken on July 7, 1999, somewhere on the Pacific between Hawaii and Japan. Sports Illustrated, Brills Content, and Life ran the photo.

The photo recently took first prize in the science and technology division in the World press Photo 2000 contest, which drew more than 42,000 entries worldwide. Because Ensign Gay is a member of the military he was ineligible for the cash prize. "In the last few days, I've been getting calls from everywhere about it again. It's very humbling." Gay, 38, manages a crew of eight assigned to take intelligence photographs from the high-tech belly (TARPS POD) of an F-14 Tomcat. In July, Gay had been part of a Joint Task Force Exercise as the Constellation made its way to Japan.

Gay used his personal Nikon 90 S, set his 80-300 mm zoom lens on 300 mm, his shutter speed at 1/1000 of a second and the aperture at F5.6. "I put it on full manual," Gay said. "I tell young photographers who are into automatic everything, you aren't going to get that shot on auto. The plane is too fast. The camera can't keep up."

At sea level a plane had to exceed 741 mph to break the sound barrier.
The change in pressure as the plane outruns all of the pressure and sound waves in front of it is heard on the ground as an explosion - the sonic
boom. The pressure change condenses the water in the air as the jet passes these waves. Altitude,wind, speed, humidity, the shape and trajectory of the plane - all affect the breaking of the barrier. On July 7 everything was perfect. "You see vapor flicker around the plane. it gets bigger and bigger, then BOOM - it's instantaneous. One second the vapor cloud is there, the next it's gone."

Why dawdle at Mach 1 when you can have Mach 3?

[jmichaelg]

Airplanes spend most of their power just pushing air out of the way - their drag rises as the cube of their airspeed. An alternative to trying to push faster through air is to build an evacuated tube between New York and Los Angeles. Put in a superconducting maglev train similar to what the Japanese have and let her rip. Since the tube's evacuated, you're not moving air out of the way so the majority of the fuel is used for acceleration and deceleration - the train coasts for most of the trip.

The maglev train's inventors have posted a proposal for a mach 3 train that would get you coast to coast in an hour and a half. Make the tube ultra straight and you can make the same trip in 45 minutes.

A Swedish engineering firm recently built the world's longest tunnel through hard rock for less than $10 million/mile. If the trans-continental tube came in at around that cost, it'd run $22 Billion. The trains themselves are estimated to cost around $5 million per car - a lot cheaper, and faster, than a $80 Million Gulfstream V.