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More On Silent Supersonic Planes
Reverberant writes "Popular Science describes the latest attempt at developing a supersonic plane designed to minimize sonic booms. The article describes some of the history behind the research, and recent attempts at validating the theory. Also note that researcher Ken Plotkin is a frequent contributer to alt.sci.physics.acoustics."
It's just you being paranoid.
A modern airliner with all the latest gadgets (GPS, EFIS, ILS) can be flown without any sort of external vision at all. Heck, the modern autopilots can take off, fly to the destination, fly the approach, and do all but about the last 50ft onto the runway.
TODO: Something witty here...
...can be found here.
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My company's UK office is very close to the flight paths into and out of Heathrow. Work comes to a stop when the Concord flies anywhere near on take off. No one notices the other commercial jets. I didn't notice it until last summer. Most of my time in the UK office was spent while those beasties were grounded. It was quite noticible when they were allowed back in the air.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
A sonic boom can also be detected at many miles distance by a wired or radio connected listening device, analyzed in a few seconds to get a fairly good idea of what sort of plane emitted it, and that information sent to the potential target, or interceptor forces, at the speed of light or close to it, long before the plane can cross the terrain to get to its target. The Soviet Union was deploying such systems in the early 1960s, and it's a fair bet that even some "third world" countries have their own variants on them today.
Who is John Cabal?
The earliest subway cars had no windows either, since there was nothing worthwhile to see. Windows were added later since they made people more at ease and helped with claustrophobia, even if what is outside isn't that pretty.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Here's an F-14 creating a sonic boom overhead in some type of airshow.
. mpg
http://users.wpi.edu/~jbendor/F-14%20Sonic%20Boom
I can't find any news article about it any more
The incident occurred on June 17. There's a brief reference to it here.
Generally, the military restricts supersonic speed over land to altitudes above 30,000 feet to limit the intensity of the sonic boom. It is probably a measure of the urgency of that mission that the F-16s broke the sound barrier so soon after take off.
correct, but the Concorde didn't ordinarily use afterburners; it had them only for the greater thrust demands at take-off and during acceleration, not for cruise. it was an expensive plane to run largely because of its low seating capacity and short range, which barred it from many of the lucrative trans-Pacific routes.
(some have also argued that the low-to-nil bypass ratio of the Concorde's Olympus engines made it more expensive to run. that may be true; i don't have any really convincing evidence either way.)
that would have had to depend on what the plane was doing. during landing, i can well believe the difference might have been small; during take-off (under afterburners, natch!) that would very much surprise me; and while supersonic, absolutely not.
Concordes were politically acceptable so long as they stayed subsonic over land, so nobody would complain about the boom. they were also hideously expensive to run, which in a more rational world might have shut them down all by itself, but apparently there were enough eccentric ultra-rich people to keep them flying for decades in spite of that fault. no amount of money, however, would let them reamin at their designed cruise speed above anyplace people lived, and that was as much a political shortcoming as a technical one.