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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."
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.
Until very recently every plane that flew above Mach 1 had to do it while on afterburners, but I believe the new F-22 Raptor can fly at "super cruise" which is some method of breaking the sound barrier without afterburners, which saves a huge amount of fuel. Last I checked the technology behind that was still secret.
I question whether this proposed airplane will actually fly in the hypersonic region, since to an engineer that means Mach 5 or above. If it can actually make the Tokyo-Paris flight in 2 hours, you could spend a day in Tokyo, fly to Paris, get a night's sleep and live the day all over again in the land of love!
Er, no. Concorde flew above 60,000 feet, where air resistance is much less than the customary 35,000 feet. Concorde was just as a fuel-efficient cruiser as subsonic planes; trouble is, it sucked 25% of it's fuel on take-off...
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%.
Huh?
Computers are much more reliable than you or I (unless running Windows, I'd never fly 'Air Windows').
Additionally, its very common, almost required, for these sorts of systems to have a manual overide, the space shuttle has manual overrides, so does your car really, when a system fails, it usually defers to you, the driver. I could also easily say that I wouldn't have crashed if the ABS hadn't gone out, or wouldn't have been injured if the airbags had gone off correctly. Those things are controled by computers too.
I think its a bit fatalistic to say that if a computer system on a plane fails, it will crash; considering that commercial airliners, to my knowledge, have never crashed due to a computer problems, they crash because of human (t)error or hydrolic problems.
You may want to see someone about your Luddite fears, technology and computers can kill you in as many ways as they can save your life.
BK
The flight from Copenhagen to Tokyo flies over Russia, not over the North Pole. I'd guess the routes from other airports in Europe also do this.
This is a European adventure, and if they want to subsidize it, have fun. Boeing tried and failed. And I'm not talking about that fuel-sucking high-subsonic Chronic Snoozer (I mean, Sonic Cruiser), they failed to pull off a viable supersonic plane before that.
But it will have a tough time getting clearance for the USA.
More annoying than jet noise are sonic booms. They are not going to be acceptable (by law) over populated areas. Therefore, any service is limited to coastal American airports (like New York City) because there just are not many airports approachable over ocean routes. Atlanta, BWI, Seattle and Orlando -- forget it (unless you want to swing way south around the FL peninsula first). LAX, NY, San Fran, New York and Boston are pretty much it, and this new aircraft would be subject to new sound analyses and intense public stakeholder scrutiny. And not many people need to fly in these planes, so they derive no benefit in having a very loud plane near their homes. It better be quiet and drop subsonic long before it approaches the coast to have a hope of landing in the USA.
As for the Air Force, I've sat on a bucolic mountaintop, enjoying the winter view and serenity, only to have a B-1 come ripping by doing low-level supersonic training. Kind of felt like a pillowfight body shot. Funny thing was, I never saw the Lancer!
Sure, a supersonic airliner would be much higher, but the sonic booms would still be unacceptable.
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
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.
Given that I get the feeling most governments are going to shortly be introducing much higher tax on aircraft fuel, I'm not sure that gas guzzling planes such as this are economical. You'd think the manufacturers would be looking towards cheaper, low consumption planes.
You sir, have nothing on people living underneath a military air approach. When a C5 galaxy comes sailing 300 feet over your house at 3am, touches down, and kicks the thrust reversers to full-throttle just so it doesn't run out of runway, come complaining. Nevermind wave after wave of f-15 on practice runs. F15's sound like crashing gongs, and a C5 will take the books off the shelf.
;-)
Military aircraft have almost zero noise abatement requirements. Two years - Hanscom AFB resident. Thankfully, it's a low-traffic airfield.
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.
Actualy, very few military aircraft have EVER spent more than a small portion of their flight time at speeds greater than Mach 1.
The SR-71 and the still-non-extistant [they say] AURORA being the only American aircraft to operate in this region for the majority of their mission.
The MiG-25 in several variations also is capable of operating in this regeim, but the combination of a maximum service life for the two fuel guzzeling Mikulin-Tumanskiy R-15BD-300 was never close to the claimed 1000 hrs and is usually considered to be 150-300 hrs in actual service, the fact that >70%of the aircraft interior being occupied by fuel tanks and that even this only permitted a range of 775 miles when operated at supersonic speed [that translates to a max endurance of 2hr 05min] clearly show why 'supercruise' is important from a cost/return point of view, and this doesn't even touch on matters of stealthiness.
Both the Concord and its' Russion counterpart were viable only as a combination of ultra-exclusive toy for the rich AND high-tech showpiece for the respective Superpowers.
It will be some time after any replacement actually enters service before we can begin to evaluate to what extent it may actually be viable in any other terms.
Thelma, I'm not making ANY deals.
Concorde was not just as efficient as other passenger planes, due to it's small size. For every gallon of fuel per passenger mile that a 747 takes, Concorde takes nearly 5.
Living in Minot, ND, home to half of the country's B-52 Stratofortress Bombers, I can tell you that there are very few things louder than those things. Before the latest war in Iraq, they would do quite a bit of their training runs at night, which oddly enough involved them using not only the Air Force Base runways, but the ones at our International Airport(small town, only 4 major flights a day). I live about half a mile from the airport and I can tell you there's nothing like waking up at 2am to the sound of B-52 slowly crawling over your house. It's really quite refreshing.
The real reason Concorde failed was that it carried too few passengers, used too much fuel and protectionism in the US blocked landing at the major airports until the consortium stopped manufacture.
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. As it were, the concord had to make a series of turns before landing at NYC to slow down, and prevent sonic booms from causing damage to all the houses.
Great Circle routes to Atlanta would require crossing land over North Carolina, or maybe even Virginia. Thus, they would have to begin decelerating on the order of 500 miles before hitting the coast. Alternatively, they would have to fly a modified (and less time and cost efficient) Great Circle over the Atlantic and make a hard turn to come over the coast further south. Even New York requires a swing east and south to get an approach.
,though. Would be prety cool if they came up with a quiet engine capable of that performance, though. Lots of devel costs for technology that different than that in use now, and no estimates on operating costs.
This also assumes that the engines are as quiet as existing commercial aircraft and would pass analysis. They are talking new technology in the article
I lived in Reading, UK, for several years in the mid nineties, directly underneath Concorde's flight route. At the same time every evening (I think something like 6.50 or something - I can't remember for sure, but it was still light outside, and I was usually watching TV at the time) Concorde would fly over. The noise was such it generally drowned out the TV.
Other jets presumably flew over all the time, but I never heard them. Concorde was different. It was naturally a noisy plane.
Not that it mattered much, one flight a day, during the early evening, isn't really unbearable, but I guess if Concordes had been as successful as the 747, that situation might have been different. Indeed, I doubt it'd have gotten that far - we'd probably see airports on the coast assuming the plane hadn't been banned completely.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"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."
Richard Branson disagrees and was willing to put money behind it. He wanted to add the old concordes to his Virgin Atlantic's fleet. His argument was that he had looked at the numbers and the Concorde was actually profitable on a per flight basis and that it was tremendously powerful for marketing purposes. So, if the concorde was full most every flight and they weren't losing money...
Branson's point was basically that the concorde's alleged unprofitability was just a persistent marketing campaign and that British Airways had just decided that it could just make more money shifting its customers over to it's regular fleet of bigger planes.
Now I don't know if Branson is right or wrong, but at least one person who was willing to put a lot of money on supersonic transport thought he could make money on it. I'm willing to believe that there is some combination of economics and engineering that make sense for faster air travel. Supersonic planes might not make sense for big airlines that have invested in large monolithic fleets, but what makes me think Branson might be right about the concorde's reputation being the result of negative marketing is the knee jerk reaction that you all have had to the prospect of renewed supersonic flight.
I'd like to see the real numbers on the concorde... operating costs versus revenue, development costs aside (which were paid for by European taxpayers). But just believing a large corporation when it says that nobody can successfully operate a supersonic aircraft just because they couldn't is just a bit too much blind faith in my book.
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
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.
Well, cut the baggage. If you're on business or weekend trip, take only cabin baggage. What you can't fit into it, buy it when you get there. It may cost a bit more, but I can guarantee it makes a world of difference in travelling comfort, especially the time when they manage to lose your baggage and you are stuck with your cabin baggage for the first day at destination anyway.
A supersonic planet discussed could even capitalize that, and charge extra for normal baggage, since majority of passengers would either not need it, or be filthy rich enough to not mind paying extra for it. Perhaps even provide "integrated" courier service to send big stuff separately a day before, "guaranteed" to be ready to be picked up from airport when you arrive. After all what's the point of putting anything except people in a fuel-guzzling supersonic jet...