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

"Bill and his mates"?

[barzok]

There's no mention of any customer at all. Are we taking potshots at MS for absolutely no reason now? There's no connection here at all.

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?

Re:Extending Length to PREVENT Sonic Booms?

[costas]

Short lesson on high-speed aerodynamics follows:

* The "intensity" (read: energy) of a boom is proportional (roughly) to the speed of the aircraft and the angle of attack of the wing or fuselage.
* To lower the energy wasted in a sonic boom, you can either go slower (neah...) or lower the angle of attack. For a wing, this is kinda easy: either sweep it back (notice a how much further back a fighter's wings are than an airliner's?) or make it thinner (so that the cross-sectional angle of attack, so to speak, is less).
* For a fuselage it gets trickier: a fighter need only fit one person, and you can extend the nose long enough to lower the leading angle of attack. And you don't care about traling shocks or really shocks at all, because you're in a fighter. You're supposed to terrify people.
* But for a commercial jet, you will have to take care of both ends of the fuselage, and the only way is to make them longer, and have them taper out smoother. Look at the Concorde's absurdly long nose (so long, it has to be pivoted so that the pilots can see the runway at take-offs and landings) and its thin tail. Now, you know why they're there.

Supersonic business jets have always been possible. However, new, more efficient engines and cheaper high performance materials are only now making them affordable (well, relatively at least :-)...

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.

Re:Concorde Avionics (or lack thereof)

[SirWhoopass]

Aviation is one of those areas where, if it ain't broke, don't fix it [insert Concorde crash joke here]. People's lives are at stake with the equipment in an aircraft, so you don't want to upgrade simply to make everything look cool.

Re:Concorde Avionics (or lack thereof)

[Remote]

People's lives are at stake with the equipment in an aircraft, so you don't want to upgrade simply to make everything look cool.

But you still want to upgrade. Reducing pilot stress is one main factor in improving safety and those cockpit's from the 60's and 70's suck. You should see the cockpit of the infamous Comet, pity I don't have a link... Modern avionics are just as reliable as old dials, but pilots don't like the feel of not having control. I used to fly airplanes (ok, Piper Cherokees) and if I could have a dial showing me tire temperature or rudder angle I'd surely want one, yet usefulness would be highly questionable.

The Concorde is a weird beast, and most things about that airplane are are different. Let me give you two examples:

Cruise flight in a modern airliner is boring. You just supervise a few systems and sip your coffee (or actually sleep, as many pilots acknowledge. Some other things they won't acknowledge...). Not in a Concorde. That airplane burns lots of fuel considering its size, which means weight and CG change considerably during a trip. The flight engineer has to monitor the fuel in the many tanks and transfer it from here to there to maintain the CG where it's supposed to be, which also depends on how the plane is loaded in each trip. Lots of calculations, lots of monitoring. Also, the lighter the airplane, the highest it will fly at optimum fuel consumption. In normal jet aviation you're given a flight level and during the trip you are tipically allowed to switch to a higher level two or three times. The Concorde flies high, above 40.000 ft, where airspace is not controlled, so the pilot can gradually increase altitude during the trip. Actually one *has* to, if consumption is to be kept to the minimum. These are two tasks that should be handled by computers in my opinion, drawing attention from the crew only if something goes out of pre-established parameters.

Formula for Slashdot articles

[Macaw2000]

Article = cool technology + attack on Bill Gates + class envy + conspiracy + neo-liberalism.

Corporate Interceptor

[Nick Number]

for a cool US$80 million, you too can overtake the Concorde on a dash to Harrods for dinner

Er, for that kind of money you might as well pick up a used F-14 Tomcat. It may not have a cushy interior and cleverly-shaped bourbon dispensers, but show me another corporate transport that mounts Phoenix missiles. You'll be envied (and feared) by all your rivals chugging around in those wimpy Learjets.

Re:Corporate Interceptor

[Nick Number]

Actually, a F-14 would be really cool for one really important reason: you can eject when nesessary.

Yep, those high-paid executives do like to bail out when the going gets tough.

What color is YOUR parachute?

Why the Sydney morning herald?

[Anonymous Coward]

The original Telegraph article is much longer and talks about the economics of production, and other developments in the fast-plane industry.

Bill?

[Otter]

Bill and his mates..Huh? There's no Bill in the article. If this is a reference to Bill Gates, it has to be the most contrived jab at Microsoft in the history of this site. (And that's saying something -- remember "Hotmail About To Collapse Under Load" or the whining about X-Box bundling recently?)

Geez, Larry Ellison flies a MiG! And Gates flew in coach, sleeping with a blanket over his head, until the mid 90's, IIRC.

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.

Re:For this kind of money...

[Tumbleweed]

That's what I was thinking...and whenever the CEO makes a statement, he can press a button for some incidental music! Or maybe rimshots whenever someone says something stupid. Think of the possibilities for humiliation of your subordinates!

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.

About private jet economics and lifestyle

[daviddennis]

I seem to remember Bill flew in Coach class until his well-known appearance made that a non-starter, so I don't think Bill's that great a candidate.

Larry Ellison, on the other hand, will buy the first one available, the microsecond it comes up. And Warren Buffet will buy a few for his Executive Jet fleet.

You can charter a Gulfstream V for $8,500 per flight hour, which means a transcontinental flight would cost about $ 38,000. Skyjet.com reports round trip charters on an IV at $60,000 for the same flight. Ownership is, of course, mind-bendingly expensive; a Gulfstream V is in the $45 million range, and the Citation X (fastest bizjet around, but less luxurious and with half the passenger capacity) is $18m. You also need a full-time pilot and copilot, together with very expensive maintenance, all of which amounts to an overhead of tens of thousands of dollars a month.

After being squeezed in like a sausage in the USAIR tourist class cabin, I can very much see the appeal of having your own jet. I'm sure that if I was as rich as Bill or Larry, a jet would be one of the first things I'd get. Bear in mind that the Gulfstream has a top speed of Mach .80 and you can get up to Mac .93 on a Cessna Citation X. So it might not be worth the extra money to go supersonic unless you're doubling or tripling the speed of sound (as you do with the Concorde). The long and thin design also might not be as comfortable as the Gulfstream.

The aforementioned Citation X is about 100 knots (or 25%) faster than a typical commercial flight, and you can arrive at a general aviation airport about 15 minutes before takeoff. Since general aviation airports are most likely a lot closer to you than commercial ones, you can save literally hours by just getting there in ten minutes and taking off almost immediately instead of taking an hour to get to the airport and taking off an hour later. This speed and flexibility is the jet's main advantage compared to, say, simply buying a first-class ticket on a scheduled airline.

In other words, if your time is worth a lot, you probably want a jet. And if you can fill it to capacity, it's not that much more expensive than first-class airfare. A Gulfstream IV can fit 19 people; first-class airfare coast to coast is about $3,068 for a non-stop flight. So if you're paying $60,000 for your round trip flight, you're paying $3,157 per person instead of $ 3,068 for first class; not too shabby.

(I spent quite a bit of time flying with a friend who owned a small propeller plane, so I can attest first-hand to the ease and convenience of general aviation airports. Sadly, I have yet to fly on a private jet).

D

Re:About private jet economics and lifestyle

[Chris Y Taylor]

There is more economic benifit to corprate jets than just getting your employees from point A to point B faster. A number of companies use them as sales tools. I once had a supplier fly me and 4 other engineers and technicians from the local airport near our plant to their production facility in a very nice corprate jet so that we could do a supplier audit* on them. They were trying to get a very valuable supplier contract with us, but it hinged on whether we thought they could consistently provide us the quality we required. We approved the company's product and process, and so they got the contract.

In this case it had very little** to do with the aircraft; we were impressed with their Quality Assurance system at the plant. BUT, if the team sent to audit the plant had consisted of a bunch of muddle-headed artsie craftsies with MBAs then I could easily see them being swayed by the possibility of more such rides, and the free steak dinners, and the liquor, and... I have got to schedule more supplier reviews.

Anyway, properly used a corprate jet can be a great tool for the sales staff in addition to transporting a companies own people. Winning one big sales account for this company could easily pay the annual maintenance and salaries to support that plane (yes, I know how expensive that is).

* A little word of advice to younger engineers; never trust a supplier's ISO, QS, or other certification. Remember how much stuff the auditor missed on your audit? They did the same thing for your suppliers. If quality is important then check them yourself.

** It did let us take the trip sooner than if we had driven or scheduled commerical flights; so they wound up getting the contract sooner than they otherwise would have been able to. But that comes back to just getting from Point A to B. Plus we were in a better mood at their plant than if we had taken conventional travel and could spend more time there. That allowed us to do a more thorough audit than we probably otherwise would have, but since these guys had a 1st rate facility that helped them more than it hurt them.

The regulation on sonic booms

[mr_death]

The government takes a dim view of sonic booms over the US land mass.

http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/cfrhtml_00/Ti tl e_14/14cfr91_00.html

91.817 Civil aircraft sonic boom.

(a) No person may operate a civil aircraft in the United States at a true flight Mach number greater than 1 except in compliance with conditions and limitations in an authorization to exceed Mach 1 issued to the operator under appendix B of this part.

(b) In addition, no person may operate a civil aircraft for which the maximum operating limit speed MM0 exceeds a Mach number of 1, to or from an airport in the United States, unless --

(1) Information available to the flight crew includes flight limitations that ensure that flights entering or leaving the United States will not cause a sonic boom to reach the surface within the United States; and

(2) The operator complies with the flight limitations prescribed in paragraph (b)(1) of this section or complies with conditions and limitations in an authorization to exceed Mach 1 issued under appendix B of this part. (Approved by the Office of Management and Budget under control number 2120-0005)

Eye Candy

[Kozz]

Take a look at a photo of a sonic boom.

And for the record, the Lameness filter sucks.

Re:Eye Candy

[David Ishee]

This isn't necessarily a picture of a sonic boom. If the aircraft is traveling close to the speed of sound, the acceleration of the air over the wing and around the fuselage will start forming a shock wave (but you won't hear a sonic boom yet). If the atmospheric conditions are right, the rapid decrease in pressure behind the shock wave which causes the air temperature to drop will cause the moisture in the air to condense into fog.

I've seen this happen to an F-18 at an air show on a high speed pass by the crowd and it was pretty cool. You saw the cloud of fog flash like a strobe light a couple of times, but it wasn't stable.

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."

missed the point

[joss]

Concorde can fly perfectly well across land, but Boeing successfully lobied US government to ban it from being used across continental USA.

This came as a rude shock and completely fucked the economics of concorde which was explicitly designed for long-haul, eg LA-London flights. It's the main reason so few were built.

Morons - what did they expect ? The US will always protect it's own corporations from competition if it can get away with it. This occurs at the expense of it's citizens, but nobody cares about that. Just like any other nation of course, but it's a lot harder to bully the US into accepting competition than smaller countries.

Learn more

[Blackjax]

This article had an annoying lack of details. These stories have more information on why this is being explored now:

aviationnow
and
savannahmorningnews

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.

MSAirforce One

[macdaddy]

MSAirforce One 2002