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Son of Concorde
targo writes "BBC reports that EADS is considering a new generation hypersonic commercial aircraft. "Son of Concorde" would be twice as fast, carry twice as many passengers while being much quieter than its predecessor. It would get from Tokyo to Paris in just two hours, US destinations are not mentioned.
However, as Japan's failure last summer suggests, it might not happen too easily."
Mr. Burns' Spruce Moose can fly from New York to the Belgian Congo in 17 minutes.
2 hours to cover half the world... It almost sounds like a low-earth-orbit travel arc.
If we couldn't get a supersonic jet to be profitable for less than $2K/ticket, how the hell is a hypersonic jet going to be profitable. I mean, sure, it carries twice the passengers, but if its going twice as fast, can we expect it to burn more fuel, too?
#define DRM chmod 000
They re-routed it, but it still affects the area pretty bad. I've seen strollers being swept around. I hope they fix it if they decide to make a successor.
MY SECRET DIARIES
Will Son of Concorde be twice the economic failure that Concorde was? On technological and inspirational grounds, Concorde was fantastic; but let's never forget that British Airways and Air France lost money hand-over-fist with the whole venture. As long as air resistance scales super-linearly with velocity, getting there faster will always prove less economical than travelling at a more sedate speed.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I'm pretty sure this new plane with rely a lot on the use of modern technology, computers stabilising the plane etc... Don't ask me why but I'm always a bit nervous of large machines or vehicles that rely heavily on computers and computer software. It's not so bad if the ECU in your car fails, you aren't going to fall out of the sky. Anyway it will be an impressive feat if they can produce this plane, once again it will be a proof of what the UK can achieve in partnership with others.
There are reasons why supersonic travel don't work, and especially in this kind of modern day economy. Firstly, they're damn ineffecient. They suck up fuel like it's not worth anything. Secondly, they're not economically effecient -- even holding twice as mayn people, you're only looking at carrying a relatively small amount fo people. Lastly, the price of development of a plane like this, and the price of the plane itself, is not worth it.
There is a reason why the modern concorde died, and it wasn't only because of the accidents that occured -- it had to do with the fact that there isn't a market for super high speed travel. People just want to get quickly from one place to another, they dont' want to go super fast. Moreover, people on the ground are already super angry about the sound of jet noise (especially near airforce bases -- I know first hand), and unless there is some sort of boom supression technology, these planes will not fly in the united states.
Our airline industry really needs to try and turn a profit ebfore they continue to waste time and money innovating. Sure the government will bail them out over and over -- like they do for the rail road companies, but I hate wasting my tax money on childlike business tactics by big airlines. Its about time some of these companies developed some responsiblity -- and a supersonic jet is not where it lies.
Let's make bigger planes, and try to keep them at relatively fast speeds. And there's my rant. Do with it as you must.
I think Europe to Japan is a North Pole route, so it's a lot shorter then it sounds.
Much as I love Really Fast things, the enviromental effects will be the big hurdel, not noise.
This sounds like aeronautical vaporware. Boeing's attempt at a higher-speed "Sonic Cruiser" was scrapped last year when the company felt that economical flight at current speeds was the way to go (via the 7E7 project), and the Cruiser wasn't even planning to pass the sound barrier.
It's one thing for EADS to think speed is the way to go, and it's quite another to propose something as ambitious as they have. Based on the article I strongly suspect they're making token research into engine tech but aren't actually trying to design a plane at all here (no mention of fuselage design at all). It's just Fun with Public Relations.
And because of that they dont have to server dinner. Pretty sneaky!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Quote from article about the original Concorde:
The companies decided to retire the famous aircraft after 27 years because it was no longer profitable.
What's the chances of a new Concorde (twice the passengers, twice the speed.. read twice the price) being able to succedd commercially in the near future, especially given the state of the post-9/11 airline industry?
Ladies, form queue here -->
Nothing beats teleportation so I'm still not buying(not that I could afford a ticket on such an aircraft).
-Tim Louden
The biggest cost to space flight is fuel. Most fuel is spend just getting the rest of the fuel off the ground. Of the fuel, 1/8th of the mass is oxygen. It stands to reason, that if we had an air-breathing plane handle the first leg of the journey, we could dramatically reduce the fuel requirements for space flight. It would be great to see something like this used as a launching platform for spacecraft.
Like they did with Concorde.
Theres a measure of fuel savings at high altitude. Going faster and higher means going further for less fuel... if you can get it up there, of course.
Somehow reading too much scifi makes it harder to enjoy new technology.
> ... US destinations are not mentioned ...
Because us Americans will complain about the noise so bitterly (why did you move next to the airport, Einstein, if you don't like engine noise? to save a few bucks? then live with the noise!) we'll still be using 1960s technology well into the 22nd century.
Must-not-watch TV!
The BBC article states clearly that they're only doing the research on the technologies, with the aim of producing a flying hypersonic craft with noise reduction down to that of a 747. It also states that they realise full well that there is no commercial market for such a craft right now.
So why are these people researching some technology that has no current market? Obviously because they realise that the market will not always be in the slump that it now is. It's called visionary thinking. The Concorde may have not covered full costs (I don't know enough about that), but it made BA and Air France a fist full of money as tickets cost around $3000 a pop IIRC and there were definitely enough rich people willing to pay those prices for a quick pop to New York or Rio, and those same rich bastards will still be willing in the future when and if this thing ever becomes a real plane.
For the rest of us there's the double decker Airbus A380 that will be making it's maiden flight in 2005.
If you don't like noisy airplanes, why the fuck do you move to live next to an airport? Fucking whiner
This article makes two claims about speed that are very different. First it says that new plane will be twice as fast as the old Concorde. Ok, seems like a suspiciously large performance leap, but the concorde at mach 2 to a new plane at mach 4 is possible.
Then it says Paris to Tokyo in 2 hours! Hell no. A quick google search shows the old Concorde flew the route in 7h 54m. Soooo, that means 4 hours for a plane twice as fast. Not two. Two hours is not even close. Nice math, BBC. It would be nice if reporters would bother to think before they write once in a while...
I'm a huge fan of 'stuff that's already been done decades ago'...
SST
And of course, for sheer brilliance and awe, the XB-70 Valkyrie can't be beat.
All this technology exists and is scumming away in museums, or even worse, in old magazines in disused libraries.
Ever sit on a 10 hour flight in coach (economy class)?
I think the aerospace industry should forget about hypersonic transports for now. Given the fierce heat dissipation problems that plagued the A-12/YF-12A/SR71 program, going beyond Mach 3.0 will require some pretty major breakthroughs in materials to fly even at over 200,000 feet altitude for near-space hypersonic flight.
Here is what I would prefer they do:
1. Forget about Mach 2.0 flight. Limiting the top cruise speed to around Mach 1.7 would drastically reduce materials cost, and would allow for extensive use of composite materials which will dramatically reduce the weight of the plane.
2. By limiting the top speed to around Mach 1.7, it also means there is less need for exotic jet engine designs, which also reduces development costs. We could, for example, develop an engine for this new SST as a derivative of the Rolls-Royce Trent engine now found on many of today's widebody airliners. That could also mean the engine will meet today's strict rules for exhaust emissions, especially oxides of nitrogen emissions.
3. Design the shape of the plane so it reduces the pressure wave buildup that causes the sonic boom and/or direct the energy of the sonic boom away from the ground.
4. Design the plane so it seats at least 200 passengers in two class seating (34" seating pitch for Economy and 43-45" seating for premium class).
I think with 2003 aerospace technology such a plane is well within technological reach. And unlike the Concorde, the new plane could probably fly at least the range of the Airbus A330-200 (about 6,600 nautical miles), and will likely meet the very strict ICAO Stage IV regulations for jet engine noise emissions. That will allow the plane to fly most of the world's major routes non-stop, won't be subject to noise restrictions at most of the world's airports, and (if they can eliminate the sonic boom problem) even allow for over-land flying that could mean cutting flight times as much as 40%.
Though I myself am a Greyhound man (17 hrs a weekend to see my girlfriend), there's a large clump of us with deep pockets; and for the above motives, in a market with no competitors, an airline with one of these puppies in their fleet can name its price for tickets and people will buy them. Especially since the Concorde was thought to be the end of all passanger supersonic travel, there's an increased excitement and novelty to this particular prospect. People will want to fly on this thing, and some of those people can actually afford to do so in such a way that the airline and the people behind the plane's construction and production will remain in, or eventually climb to, the black.
Plus all that stuff about it being efficient, quiet, larger capacity and range, twice as fast, yada yada... My point is supersonic travel will always be at least a "going concern" and one day perhaps profitable.
At the very least, it'll make a country look good to have one of these babies -- the prime reason the UK subsidized the unprofitable Concorde.
I agree with some of the previous posters that there is a very limited market for this. Sure everyone wants to travel halfway around the world in 2 hours, but who can afford it? I think something like the Boeing 7E7 Dreamliner is much more likely to succeed. Most people will choose a more reasonably priced luxury flight over a hypersonic flight even if it does take twice as long.
Can I just say, "who gives a damn?!"
:-)
It's not like anyone but the rich will be able to afford this anyway. What was it, around 5,000 to fly on the Concorde?
The rest of us are stuck in coach, unless the place we're working for decides to fork it out, and even then, it's usually business-class, not first.
good one. really.
*Click* ( sound of pistol being cocked ) /Mr-Burns : " I Said get in!!! "
Does this mean that it will be taken out of commission twice as fast as the original, too?
As I read /. I am struck by the persistence of people saying:
* This can't be done!
* This can't be done economically!
* We shouldn't try because it can't be done.
I just hope the people working on making a plane that will cut down on my travel time have a different attitude. I hope they are asking how can it be done? rather than why can't it be done.
It's easy to be a nay sayer. Nothing exposes genius faster than naysayers proven wrong.
-- $G
Tokyo to Paris in 2 hours is over a third of orbital speed. Going that fast would require getting 'way above what we normally consider "atmosphere" and skimming the boundary of space.
How about 87 Billon?
Look at the name, Son of COncord. Coincidence?
Here is a BBC news story on the topic. NASA's canceld project is on the top.
It seems that banking the future on bigger planes is kind of mistake. It assumes that airlines can fill bigger planes with passengers. This assumption in the past has created inefficiencies in air travel by forcing customers to fly out their way on smaller planes to hubs and only then go to where they wanted to go in the first place. Bigger planes also can force airlines to sell more heavily discounted tickets to fill the planes.
OTOH faster planes can allow passengers to go to where they want to go without useless detours. Faster smaller planes can allow airlines to sell more standard priced tickets and not play the hub and spoke game with prices. And since planes fly at higher altitude we can put more space between planes. More terminals will need to be built to accommodate more flights, but that is happening anyway. And, with less time on a plane there is less chance of customer service issues.
Combined with some thought on other ways to launch planes, and super sonic speed might be practical.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Let me seee...
1 hour to get to airport,
1.5 hours check in before departure,
2 hours flight time,
30 minutes to get baggage
1 hour custums and immagration.
Yep, we need faster air travel.
Particularly this morning when my flight was delayed an hour because the pilot had not arrived and a replacement needed to be found.
The price of a ticket should be no more than a 747 if Jones' calculations are correct. Some preliminary calculations show that natural gas would be even better for this system than normal jet fuel but it wouldn't be absolutely necessary.
Seastead this.
That's the question. :-)
How about 87 Billon?
... but something tells me that it's a puny downpayment on the final unpayable bill.
Eighty-seven billion will do for a start
-kgj
-kgj
It appears the Beeb has confused peak speed with average speed.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, the Great Circle distance from Paris to Tokyo is 6033 miles. Let's round that to 6000 mi. The speed of sound varies with temperature, but using 750mph makes the math easy (at aircraft altitudes, the speed of sound is closer to 700mph).
If it could hold the fuel, the Concorde at Mach 2 (1500mph) could do 6000 miles in four hours. If the EADS jet achieves Mach 4 (3000mph), it could do 6000 miles in two hours. If the entire distance were covered at cruising speed.
My impression (purely from being a passenger) is that it takes half an hour or so for a typical commercial airliner on a 1000 mile flight to reach cruising speed and altitude; the plane will then be at cruising speed for about 60 minutes, and then another 30 minutes is spent in deceleration. Of the 2 hours spent in the air, only half of the time is actually spent at crusing speed.
How long would it take for the EADS-SS to reach Mach 4? And how long would it take it to slow down from that speed to the typical 150mph (+/-) landing speed that current runways are designed for? I doubt the typical passenger is prepared for Michael Schumacher / John Force g-forces on takeoff and landing.
Let's say the EADS-SS takes 45 minutes to reach Mach 4, and another 45 minutes to drop back to landing speeds. Assuming linear acceleration and deceleration, that's an hour and a half spent at an average speed of 1500mph. So 2250 miles of the trip takes 1.5 hours. Transiting the remaining 3750 miles at Mach 4 (3000mph) would take another 1.25 hours, for a total trip of 2.75 hours. [Ignoring any ground taxi times or other delays.]
I would think, fuel-wise (which is basically the only marginal cost of airplane flight), that going from Mach 2 to Mach 4 is more expensive than going from Mach 1 to Mach 2. On the other hand, Mach 1 -> 2 is done in denser air than Mach 2 -> 4, so maybe not.
This could be a great question for a final exam in Engineering Analysis and Synthesis.
The problem is that even a large subsonic airplane costs billions of dollars to develop. The development cost of a supersonic plane is even more. For a supersonic passenger transport to exist requires MASSIVE government subsidies, and most taxpayers would not want to touch it.
Do people want to go on a 2 hour flight rather than an 8? Yes they do, but, not for 10 times the price. Maybe if it were just double, but not ten times.
Moral of the story: Supersonic transportation for the masses will happen when the masses can actually afford it!
This is my sig.
Well, not quite, but Melbourne-Frankfurt (with stopover in Singapore), and also LA-Melbourne (a 15-hour nonstop flight, until recently the world's longest scheduled flight). I defy anyone to do those routes and then tell me there's not a latent market for supersonic travel.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Even if we were to travel from london to tokyo in 2 hours for most of us it would be of no consequence as we spend a very significant amount of time travelling to the airport ,checking in etc.
from my personal experience i can say that travelling to heathrow from centarl london will take abt 1 hour by tube or anything upto 1hr 30 min by road.
i dont think i had pay a premium to travel fast if i were spending such a huge amount of time prior to boarding the plane just to board the plane.
actual tarvelling time is usually a small proportion of our journey time.
Wanted : A Signature.
Last I checked, hypersonic is Mach5+ (perhaps google can help). For such speed you either need an afterburner, and a pretty big one (AFAIK one from a high-numbered MIG) or a bloody ramjet!
Yeah, right, this is going commercial - not even the military uses it in anything but research!
Thanks, but in this light I'd feel safer, not to mention I get better food, using QM2.
Okay, time's up. The answer is NONE! Nada. Rien. Zilch.
Don't even try to claim that the Raptor would have been such a success if it weren't for those folks from McDonnell-Douglas. Boeing had been building nothing but transport a/c and ISR platforms. Talk about stodgy!
While the concorde did land in New York, it had to drop to subsonic speed over the Atlantic (in accordance with the FAA rule), so the plane is essentially useless for US domestic flights.
Just building such an aircraft would be an engineering marvel. You're talking about building a commercial aircraft that flies faster than the SR-71, and potentially higher. And instead of moving 2 guys in pressurized flight suits and some cameras with the need for refueling every ~2 hours, you want it transport a few hundred people in relative comfort half way around the world? Just getting any airfram to 4 MACH without melting is quite an accomplishment of materials and aerospace engineering.
. In your car, is it any worse that your ECU fails than, say, a piston?
Depends on how it fails. A minor failure of either might be ignored--a major failure of either could cause instantaneous highway death.
Or a tire? Or the axel on your local Amish's wagon?
Hey, the Amish (who really aren't around here AFAIK) generally drive a slow-enough speeds that no one is in danger if one of their axels break.
Is it worse that your spinal cord breaks or your leg is severed?
Spinal cord. A severed leg can be replaced, and I've always got the other leg.
A broken spinal cord could mean no more sex!
(And yes, I do get some.)
I'm pretty sure that f-15's can cruise at or slightly above mach2 and the russians had a mig that could cruise at mach 3...
I think f-16's can reach mach 1.6, if I remember right, so it seems to me that cruising speed might be around mach1, and they've been around for a relatively long time now...
Wow! This sounds like an exciting new business opportunity! Where do I sign up? Also, does this come with a dental plan?
A sonic boom is not a one time event. It follows the plane over its entire flight corridor. This is why the concorde was disallowed from flying over land.
-
The F-22 is NOT the first fighter to achieve super-cruise, it was the EFA, (Eurofighter) or "Typhoon" that first achieved this feat, which you correctly stated as BREAKING the sound barrier without Afterburner, not just sustaining it after getting there. Getting most fighters beyond the sound barrier uses up so much fuel, there is little left for the mission. The F-22 and Typhoon can set their throttles in Mil-power; 100% without Afterburner, and break the sound barrier without reducing their operational range.
It's a trap!
not quite. I work for an airline. A positively giddy amount of work goes into flight planning. Shortest path comes into it if you're trying to be quicker, but these days fuel burn and thus cost matters a lot. Trying to maximize your tailwind, reduce headwind, avoiding restricted airspace and following airways (like an interstate in the sky) for air traffic control reasons. This might answer the "hops" you talk about. Its navigational beacons which are often at airports.
Which brings us to tracking. If you're over the open ocean you follow tracks. Its a bit like hunt for red october going through the canyons. This speed, at this altitude through these points to maintain separation. Over land, you can be spotted within a couple hundred miles by your ground-air comms. And theres a lot of those. You are almost right on the airports, depending on where you're flying, type of aircraft and and how many engines you must be within a certain flying time of a suitable airport. Its called ETOPS.
So lots of things to worry about, including weather, but it typically starts with shortest distance.
Decelleration from normal aircraft speed to landing speed would be done whilst in the normal approach queue. However the aircraft would have to slow down to normal crusing speed M0.78 before joining the queue, this slowing could be done whilst decending from whatever flight level EADS-SS operated at e.g. 60,000 ft+ to normal approach queue height of 19,000ft.
On take off the aircraft would have to travel at normal subsonic speeds (to maintain normal seperatation) until it reached at least 35,000 ft at which point it could climb and accelerate away from all the slugs.
Concorde could when allowed go from wheels up (take off) to M1.0 in 5 minutes (100% power with afterburner) and M2.0 in 7 minutes. However this was only done once using a production plane from a lightly used airport with no (paying) passengers and no noise or seperation requirements.
By going with a smaller aircraft, Learjet sized, you can reduce design and manufacturing costs. That and you can target the filthy-rich-let's-buy-a-trip-on-a-Soyuz-for-fun market instead of the save-bucks-at-all-costs airline market.
Once a few supersonic bizjets are on the market, it would be easier to scale the designs up to airliner sizes.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Lets not forget the fact that the thing would SHATTER WINDOWS flying over the continental US. Sonic booms do damage, which is why there is a max speed airplanes can fly over the US
way, way oversimplified. sonic booms don't automatically shatter windows- there are different degrees of booms; i live near edwards air force base, and we've been boomed by sr-71's, f22's, f15's, and god knows what else, and i've never had a shattered window. some of the booms you hardly notice, but some are literally earth shaking. =)
Ben Rich, head of Lockheed's Skunk Works and propulsion designer on the SR-71, refused to bid on that idea. "We used titanium. You know anything stronger?" The SR-71 was speed-limited by the melting point of its skin. More power could have been added, but woudn't help. Just cooling the pilot was a major effort. Cooling a big passenger cabin would be really tough.
Ceramics? Maybe someday, but they're brittle, like the Space Shuttle tiles.
I will consider paying today's first class rates (on our current subsonic planes) for a economy style seat on a suborbital plane if I could fly from Singapore to London in 2 hours.
2 hours is a heck of a lot different from 14-15 hours. A holiday to Europe can now be two days longer than before just by saving on travel time (goodness knows about the jet lag with that kind of travel speed though). That's a lot of time if you're working and your annual leave is limited.
This kind of utility is, imho, worth paying two to three times or slightly more than the current prices.
Note: I am not rich.
2 hours to reach the airport
2 hours lost at the airport
2 more hours (+/-) waiting for your delayed airplane [I think THIS PART should be improved]
*** FLIGHT *** ONLY 2 HOURS!!!
At least 2 hours to find your luggages [if you're lucky] and reach your real final destination
Or at least use .75 mach, which is binary aligned (0.11).
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Roughly 9445 km between Brussels and Tokyo and
8574 between Warsaw and Tokyo.
(source: http://www.astro.com/atlas)
And it isn't like an SST has to fly into all major airports. A few will do -- especially if the tickets are comparable to 747 tickets.
Seastead this.
Mod this shitstain down, he just made all this up.
and will probably need between 2 and 4 times as much gas. No we don't have a problem with ozon holes. Duh.
Been in Sydney with the Rugby World Cup having just finished last weekend a lot of reports were of English fans jumping on a plane too come out for just the weekend to enjoy the game and then go back home.
It is a changing world, the last time I traveled to England it took 20+hours to get there and I expect it still takes a similar time period. People are becoming more globaly minded, sure it was for just the World Cup final, but if this is a future trend of people flying half way around the world for sport then supersonic flight has a real and possible future.
As long as they dont develop a market for the rich only then it is highly likely that supersonic flight will take off and the airline industry should start to come around in the next few years.
Considering this plane will probably take a fair while to fully develop now is a good time to get the ball rolling and develop a plane that could very well be in high demand in the next 10-20 years.
Oh yeah, for those non rugby fans, England won and it was freaking beautiful, would have been well worth the trip I think..
37 - what does it stand for really...
...every time you shoehorn an uncalled for anti Windows gag into a completely unrelated story, another kitten dies.
Airbus (as the inherited manufacturer) had pulled the certificate for the Concorde. No certificate, no-one can fly it and carry passengers. Concorde relied on a chain of fragmented small companies to service her, which were no longer in place - Branson knows this (he owns an airline, FFS) - it was a publicity stunt.
Here's an old joke I heard serveral years ago :
:
...
Passengers in a new and massively computerized aircraft are hearing the welcome message from the computerized crew
- Ladies and gentlemans, this is your commandant Joshua system X-8843-Z v1.1r speaking.
- I am proud to have you on board this entierly computeriezed aircraft.
- For your security, every systems are build at a failproof level and redondancy.
- The X-8843-Z aicraft system makes you travel with the highest security and safety level ever encountered.
- You are ensured nothing can go wrong
(clic) sured nothing can go wrong,
(clic) sured nothing can go wrong,
(clic) sured nothing can go wrong,
(clic) sured nothing can go wrong
Léa Gris
It'd be a real option for me to take such a flight. A flight from NY to anywhere in the far east takes more than 12hrs on a non-stop flight.
Ever sit on a plane for more than 12hrs? The seemingly endless hours will make you want to walk up and down the isles, read that magazine again for the 5th time, play that gameboy game till the batteries die, and force yourself to sleep through the ride.
By the time you arrive at your destination, you're pretty beat up. The whole flight screws up your concept of night and day and jet lag sets in pretty hard.
Man, 2 hours? Business travel would explode!
The main reason supersonic transports aren't feasible is because of cycling. For commercial aircraft, the cyclic stresses are often the cause of failure. I'm talking here about the stresses associated with heating up the aircraft (during flight) and then allowing it to cool on the ground before going up again (maybe on an hour later), and the additional stresses that come during flight (like load on the wings), and then are absent when on the ground.
For a supersonic aircraft, the effect of these stresses is much worse. Flying above Mach 1 generates enormous heat on the skin of the plane. This expands the metal, which then contracts when the plane lands and cools down. The problem is all of this cyclic stress tends to open up cracks in the skin much faster than normal, constant stress. Because the stresses are much higher than in normal planes, a supersonic plane has to undergo maintenance much more often than a normal plane.
The huge increase in maintenance generally overwhelms any premium you can charge for the tickets. That's why supersonic planes have generally been a losing proposition.
(Slightly off topic, but there has been some discussion of the SC's failure here) I think that the Sonic Cruiser was possibly introduced as a mainly vapourware device to forestall interest in the Airbus 380 when it was first introduced in the late 90's. I remember quite a lot of turmoil going on over at Boeing when the A380 concept was announced and one should remember that there were no programmes or anything at the time. They were all simply concept studies which cost a lot less than actually starting an engineering programme.
Boeing talked for a while about making an extended upper deck version of the 747, called the 747X IIRC, but it was eventually shelved, I assume for engineering reasons as well as the feeling that it would not work financially. I remember some discussion that the wing of the 747 would have had to be redesigned to support the load which would have meant basically a new airplane.
Boeing the came up with the Sonic Cruiser, I think mainly to have something to show at the Paris airshow in 96 or 98 so as not to be totally out in the cold when Airbus announced full commitment to the A380. I was never sure just how serious Boeing were to the SC, as the concept had a some plusses (slightly higher speed but not radically more so -- around 100 mph faster) but a lot of questions, such as not having much passenger space compared to other widebodies and questionable fuel efficiency.
And so today we have the A380 coming in two years and no SC. To it's credit Boeing has made a lot of mileage out of the 737 line with newer versions continuing to sell very well and compete well against the A320 family in the regional market where the biggest growth has been in airlines.
The 7E7 will probably compete well against the A330/A340 family in the future if it truly is as efficient as Boeing hopes, since it is still in early design stages.
Tree-hugging Euro-Americans no longer have the stomach to finance build cutting edge technology. The US never built its super-sonic plane due to concern about destoying the ozone. (A US rocket launch reates a ozone hole for about a half-day.)
China has both the will and finances to pursue advance science project. Look at their nascent space program. China's CDP is the worlds second largest, if you properly valuate their currency (see the Big Mac index). It is growing torridly and could pass the USA for number one by 2030.
While the XB-70 Valkyrie was not quite as fast as the SR-71, it was nearly as fast (Ben Rich in "Skunk Works" tries to tell us it was only Mach 2.5, but that was only for the number 1 XB-70 because when they took it up to Mach 3, parts melted off (the brazing on the honeycomb steel panels came apart) and got ingested in the engines). They fixed that problem on the number 2 XB-70, but they crumped the number 2 XB-70 in a fatal rear-end collision doing a photo op with a bunch of "chase planes", and the XB-70 parked inside the Dayton, Ohio Air Force museum is the Mach 2.5-capable number 1 plane.
Anyway, the XB-70 also experienced the unstart problem. The XB-70 was used for aero research for the SST, and the honkin' sonic booms from the XB-70 were part of what helped discourage the SST. It was also noted that unstarts were pretty scary and would need to be remedied for the SST.
Concord/Concorde has movable inlet ramps for the shock waves -- I wonder if it ever experienced unstarts?
Also, the XB-70 was supposed to use "compression lift" -- they stuffed the six engines in this big, wide pod under the delta wing to get lift from the shock wave. This was supposed to make it much more aerodynamically efficient than the typical supersonic aircraft, allowing it to have intercontinental supersonic cruise range. I also heard that the compression lift didn't quite work up to the expectations of the wind tunnel model tests.
Is anyone considering whether compression lift (apparently there is better fluid modeling software) can result in a more fuel-efficient/longer-range SST?
With them taking the lead recently in passenger-carrier design, leave it to Airbus in Tolouse to come up with all the innovation.
Too bad for Boeing that all they seem to care about these days is administration-guruanteed purshases of military weapons. Their latest involvement in an industrial espionage case is a testament to their willingness to bypass fair competition and use corrupt methods.
Like they did with Concorde.
I thought web-based virtual conferencing (like Webex) was going to eliminate much of the need to get from point A to point B via a low fuel efficiency, high pollution method.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
From the British Thunderbirds 60s TV series I give you the Mach 6 Fireflash!
(Now if they could just learn how to make civillian aircraft whose safety systems are more reliable...)
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I participated in the design of this engine...
I second the comment that single cristal blades are everywhere (I am not an aerospace historian, but I believe that every engine we have made for the last 2 decades has used single crystal blades).
But it is not titanium, it is a nickel alloy...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Actually, the concorde cruised at Mach 2 without afterburners. The afterburners were used for take-off, the acceleration from subsonic to M1.70, and then they were not needed for speeds above M1.7. This is documented in quite a few books about Concorde.
They didn't call it supercruise though, as that is a marketing buzz word developed recently to help sell fighters. There is no maqic about supercruise - it is just a matter of having an efficient intake system that decelerates the air to subsonic speed going into the engine, and an efficient nozzle system to accelerte the exhaust to supersonic speed so you can get net positive thrust.
Kevin Horton
How about electrical interference from cell phones, laptops etc.... all of these may cause electronics and on-board computers some problems.
A paper by Lee, SeeBass and Sobieczky gives the passenger capacity of the OAW SST as 700 passengers.
Seastead this.
The wing span of the OAW SST is around 145m (for a 700+ passenger version). The main strip at Heathrow might handle this as long as the wings could extend quite a bit beyond the edges of the runway and the landing gear could be set up to come down in stages. This wing has a LOT of lift at low speeds because it is traveling normal to the flight path at those speeds and its nothing but wing. You don't have to support the full weight on the landing gear until you're basically at a crawl. How this would handle in high winds is an interesting issue of course.
Seastead this.
Okay, there are already a lot of +5 comments on this topic, so I suppose this one will probably never get read. But just in case you are reading this...
Regardless of whether it can be done or not, I want to register the opinion that easy, cheap world travel is actually a bad thing. When products and people can get anywhere in the world cheaply, then they do. This leads to single culture kinds of things, which makes you wonder why you were travelling at all! Similar to cultural diversity is the problem with bio-diversity (from which the whole arguement stems). The sheer number of biological invaders is astounding. Consider how many times you've been annoyed by those Japanese beetles (that look a lot like lady bugs). A few years ago, those didn't exist in North America. Now, they exist without bound. You can bet that there will be more and more of these problems in the future.
Yes, I enjoy travel quite a bit. And I don't like the idea of restricting travel. But we need more bio and cultural diversity. It keeps the world healthy.
1. 2.
I agree with you that "can-do" is the essence of the hacker mentality, and that's a wonderful thing. But I think some of the skepticism -- including mine -- comes from asking the question "Why should it be done?"
Does it really solve a customer's problem? Is the customer willing/able to pay for it? Can it be done faster/better/cheaper than alternatives?
E.g., is the real problem "a peak cruising speed of 0.9M is insufficient" or is it "the whole experience of commercial air travel is a pain in the ass"? If the latter, is $10B in heroic engineering really the way to solve the problem? Or is the solution as simple as $150 in limos, FedEx, and neck rubs? Or comfier seats, better food, and shorter lines? Or [insert favorite low-tech solution]...
It is worth remembering that the Concorde was not the only supersonic airliner. The Soviets built the Tupolev 144.
Like they did with Concorde.
Unless they get the noise level down a lot more than any current supersonic plane it won't be operating at those speed in Europe either. Its all nice to say you have fast planes, but once you have to listen to them everyday things change.
OTOH, if they demonstrate that the noise of operating at supersonic speeds is less than current jets expet the ban to be droped. (Less than because current jets are still too loud)
A bad early-80's disaster flick's already been done about this: Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land