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France and Japan Planning New Supersonic Jet
jonerik writes "According to this article from the Associated Press, Japan and France are cooperating on research to produce a supersonic passenger plane that would be able to carry 300 passengers (three times as many as the Concorde) and fly from New York City to Tokyo in a mere six hours. Current plans are for the plane to be able to cruise at mach 2.4 while reducing the noise and high fuel consumption associated with the Concorde during its years of service. Although Japan had previously done extensive research towards building a 250-person mach 1.6 passenger jet, the agreement with France - announced at the annual Paris Air Show on Tuesday - represents a interesting shift in technological alliances given the Japanese aviation industry's longstanding ties to the United States. 'To research closely in this area with the Europeans does represent something new,' said Yoshio Watanabe, an official with The Society of Japanese Aerospace Companies, which is heading the new initiative on the Japanese side."
represents a interesting shift in technological alliances given the Japanese aviation industry's longstanding ties to the United States
Does it really or are they just trying to benefit from France's experiences with the concorde for this project?
Nowhere in the article does it say it'll change it's alliance for anything else.
Sig? What's this sig thing I hear people talking about?
"Although Japan had previously done extensive research towards building a 250-person mach 1.6 passenger jet, the agreement with France - announced at the annual Paris Air Show on Tuesday - represents a interesting shift in technological alliances given the Japanese aviation industry's longstanding ties to the United States."
The U.S. aviation industry has no desire to build these aircraft. The FAA prohibits supersoinc flight over US Soil @ any altitude without prior special approval.
I don't think US carries have ever been that interested in supersonic aircraft. One of the biggest hurdles is the prohibition against going supersonic over land which would drasictally limit the number of possible routes. I would make sense for Japan to do such research in that much of thier flying time would be over water anyway. I will be interesting to see if this actually catches on though. Boeing was working with the Russians for a while and nothing panned out there. Nor did anything pan out on the mach .98 plane they were designing.
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Little bag of peanuts: Extra
Want a pillow? Should have thought to bring one
Brought a pillow? Sorry, you have to check that.
Please remove all your clothes at the security check. Bend over.
First-class passengers, none of the above apply to you. Please walk the red carpet to your private cabin and enjoy some champagne from your gold-edged crystal. Foot-rub, sir?
Main cabin passengers, where do you think you're going, buster? Get in line! Wait yer turn! You think we want to carry scum like you? Food service? HA! Should have bought a sandwich before you got on board. We only serve food in coach on flights of 6 hours, 1 minute or longer, and this flight is 6 hours even. Sucker.
The plane will carry 300 Japanese passengers or 150 American passengers.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Bing Bing Bing! We have a wrong answer!
Sonic boom is tottaly due to pressure waves created by going faster than the speed of sound.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_boom
How interesting. You Yanks didn't seem to mind during the Revolutionary War.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
France's bid to build ITER is the backed by the EU, so we're talking 450 "mega-people" and 10+ "giga-dollars" of GDP.
And it is in fact the EU that has promised to build the project on its own anyway if it doesn't go through internationally.
The whole world treats the US as damage and goes around it.
Except that 3 is irrelevant, for the fact that the flight path looks like this: http://gc.kls2.com/cgi-bin/gcmap?PATH=jfk-tyo (thanks to an earlier poster).
That sounds like an awful little money for such a project. I'm really not sure if they actually are planning to build working planes.
On the other hand, this makes some sense. The French not only participated in Concorde, but have been making supersonic fighter jets for a long time. It appears France is only country who can still build supersonic jets with 100% ingenious technology. And it's a major member of the European consortium (Airbus).
There have long been a frustration in the Japanese aerospace industry that the Americans banned them from pursuing cutting edge aerospace technology after the WWII. It is a commonly held view that the US didn't want Japan to acquire know-how in that area so that she can independently develop and compete in the military aircraft field. (Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, and Subaru used to make airplanes. Look where they went.) So, the US kept supplying technology to Japan while not allowing ingenious know-how to accumulate.
A famous incidence was when the Japanese were planning a new fighter/attack plane. Those in the uniform wanted to go ingenious design (they always want to go domestic even when the equipment is prohibitively expensive), but because of the pressure from the States, it became a joint project between Japan and the US based on F-16 design. The result Mitsubishi F-2 is mediocre at best.
I would imagine there is a genuine fear that aerospace industry gets monopolised by Americans in the near future among other countries. So, a supersonic passenger plane appears to be a good excusable exercise to develop and accumulate the technology, especially when Americans are not seriously doing it.
Completely wrong. What event horizon?
Shockwaves are caused by an object moving through a fluid faster than the speed of sound (ie: the speed of pressure wave propagation in the fluid). At subsonic speeds, pressure waves bouncing back from an object affect the incoming flow, basically "warning" it of the existance of the object. That's how the fluid can flow smoothly around the object --- the pressure waves caused the fluid's path to change long before it hit the object. At supersonic velocities, the pressure waves don't move fast enough to affect the incoming flow. So the fluid cannot flow smoothly around the object, and a shock wave is created where the fluid has to instantaneously react to the presence of the object.
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It's just you.
Technological advancement has been increasing at an exponential rate from the beginning; it's just that most of it is occurring at the micro- and nano-scale where you take it for granted. biotech, cloning, the Internet, Google, nano-materials, 133MHz (in 1995) to 3+ GHz today, etc.
Most large-scale tech is also progressing, but you don't notice it at the human-scale, and you won't, until we can build amazing things using bottom-up nanotech instead of top-down bulk-tech.
Consider a better, safer, cheaper and much faster way to get from NYC to Tokoyo with near-future tech: A maglev train via an underground tunnel, in vacuum for frictionless acceleration to ludicrious-speed at the midway point before decel. Currently, tunnel excavation is labor intensive and very EXPENSIVE; precise control over matter and robotic automation will change that.
Power to the Peaceful
I hope the project is successful, however, if it doesn't get buy-in from the beginning it could suffer the same fate as Concorde. Although Concorde was a technical marvel, the U.S. did everything it could to scuttle the project, for example, its flight certificate was delayed by the FAA until it was sure the project was busted. The premise of Concorde was fast trans-atlantic flight, but its first scheduled route was Heathrow to Bahrain because countries followed the U.S. and refused flight certificates. By the time the U.S. did grant a heavily restricted certification the lack of orders had made continued manufacture untenable. It's quite ironic that the U.S. refused certification on environmental grounds.
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I'm sure there will be the usual Concorde counter-arguments posted here, some of them are true. It's true that it was a fuel hog and it's true that it was noisy. But if 500 were built instead of just 16 supersonic flight would have become much cheaper. With only 16 all parts were custom built and very expensive. Heck the Concorde has more in common with the SR-71 than a 737. It boggles the mind to think that it cruised faster than an F-18's top speed.
My father worked on the project from the beginning, for those interested here's a link to a couple of photos he took when Concorde 002 made its maiden flight-
http://latte.com/gallery/Concorde-002-First-Fligh
It's NOT a law of physics that an object moving through a fluid faster than the speed of sound must generate a shock wave. The Navier-Stokes do have solutions at supersonic speed that do not involve a discontinuity in pressure (shock wave).
A supersonic bullet not generating a sonic boom was designed in the 60s so if a sniper misses the target on the first attempt the target will not get a warning (the noise of a bullet is supersonic boom. Muzzle noise is far away and supposedly masked by a silencer). The bullet has a cylindrical shape with completely straight outer edge and internally it has a carefully designed inlet coupled to a carefully designed expansion nozzle.
It doesn't generate any aerodynamic lift. Generating lift would require breaking the symmetry and that, of course, would break the careful arrangement that eliminates the shockwave. An airplane must generate lift and there it would seem that this effect cannot be used. However, an airplane also has an engine. If the engine's energy is added to the equasions there can be solutions that generate lift and still have no pressure discontinuities. These mathematical solutions are proven to exist, but haven't been found, yet. If they are found, there is no guarantee that thay can be made into a practical airplane - but there's NO law of physics saying it's impossible!
Note that the shockwave CAN be reduced by orders of magnitude by careful design down to the point where it's probably not a problem. Here I am talking about totally eliminating it in the mathematical sense.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.