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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..."
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.
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.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
A dedicated 100-Mb fiber link should be sufficient. Imagine hardball business negotiations in 9-channel Dolby surround sound.
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.
.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.
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
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
The government takes a dim view of sonic booms over the US land mass.
i tl e_14/14cfr91_00.html
http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/cfrhtml_00/T
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)
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
Take a look at a photo of a sonic boom.
And for the record, the Lameness filter sucks.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
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