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Successful Supersonic Jet Launch
Cave_Monster writes "Japan has hailed the test of a supersonic jet in South Australia's outback as a success. Unlike the attempt in 2002, this test saw the jet launch successfully from Woomera, South Australia." From the article: "Data gained through the test will be used in joint research by Japan and France towards a next-generation supersonic jet. No budget projections have yet been made for the entire project, which Japanese hope will produce a supersonic passenger jet capable of flying from Tokyo to New York in just under six hours - less than half the current time of a Concorde." We reported on the plan to do this, earlier.
I think it would be cool to travel Mach 2 on a commercial airliner. But chances are some new type of propultion will come along before this project finishes.
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I wonder how long it would take a hypersonic vehicle then, like an hour and a half?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Sub orbital hops would be quicker & cooler
Go Away! Not for Sale
The linked article states the jet is designed to fly at mach 2 which is the same as Concorde (albeit with three times as many passengers) so how is it supposed to fly Tokyo > New York in half the time Concorde could do it if it goes the same speed?
The FAA restricts the noise not the speed of aircraft going over the US, so keep it quiet and you can go as fast as you want.
Would be kinda hard to keep that sonic boom muffled down, unless someone has figured out a way around that...
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
If my aging memory serves correct, one of the key issues that killed off America's SST project was potential damage to the Ozone layer. Has this problem been solved, or simply ignored?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
...flying from Tokyo to New York in just under six hours - less than half the current time of a Concorde.
Something's wrong here. Flying from Tokyo to NY on a 747 takes about 12-13 hours. I expect a Concorde would do it in about 6 hours too.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
With peak oil looming, shouldn't they be researching alternative ways of powering air travel?
That Woomera was named after an Aboriginal device to assist spear-throwing?
Wikipedia link
I've always thought it's a very fitting name for the town since it's where most of Australia's missle and rocket launches are done from. Whether it is just co-incidence or not I don't know, but it's quite appropriate.
Supersonic long range air travel SHOULD be the way we are heading, but everyone's so freaking scared of them now because of the concorde crash, which was only fault of that airplane in a miniscule way. Seriously, I don't get what people are so scared of. The thing flew for over 30 years with only one crash that wasn't really its fault (re: debris on the runway flattened a tire which ruptured a fuel tank). Hell, in that time, how many passenger jets have gone down? dozens. And people still fly on those.
Engine tech is what made it so expensive. Above mach 1, turbojets get horridly inefficient and hard to maintain. What we need to do is progress to ramjet technology for the cruise, and turbojets for take off and landing. Rams will get you up to mach 5 if you want to push that far. And the whole thing could be hydrogen powered (required for higher machs and decent efficiency doing it). Mach 3 or 4 would be pretty ideal.
Insightful my foot. At supersonic altitudes a sonic boom isn't an issue. Way back when, U.S. aircraft manufactuers hammered Congrees with exaggerated horror stories of constant sonic booms shaking the pictures off the walls... while the real issue lay in the fact that nothing they had on the drawing boards would compete with Concorde. So they legislated away almost all of the profitiable routes and left the SST with nothing but transoceanic flights.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
As I understand it (taken of course, with as much salt as slashdot requires), said supersonic laws were put in place as another step in the 'spat' between American and European aerospace markets. A lot of effort was put into projects on all sides in the 60s. The anglo-french Concorde got off the ground, as did the russian Tupolev Tu-144. The Boeing 733-197 ('2702') was prototyped, paid for mostly (75%) by government funding, and eventually killed by politicing over this spending. In 71, the senate cut funding, killing the project. In 72, Congress passed the Noise Control Act amending the Federal Aviation Act. In 77, amendments added Noise Stage 3 to Federal Aviation Regulations 36, effectively banning civilian sonic booms.
The Tu-144 and Concorde both flew supersonic in 1969, before the american political problems. Concorde was never profitable because this 'spat' removed access to a lot of routes. Sonic booms have never been the real issue, simply used to rally support for the anti-spending angles. I'm sure the military routinely fly supersonic over the continental US, and more visably, the shuttle wouldn't be making it's florida approach across most the southern US if supersonic travel caused half the problems attributed to it.
Sore losers?
Actually I would prefer to see a "really" cheaper way to travel, for instance I find it regretable that Dirigible are not more investigated.
The Hindenburg crash killed them originally, but people do forget that the Dirigible was actually quite safe, and could probably be safer now (even hydrogen based dirigible) and they need much less infrastructure than planes.
I believe that the state sponsored duopole (Boeing/Airbus) nature of aeroplane manufacturing is a strong factor stiffling innovation there.
>Create a super-duper bigass tunnel made with the best sound insulation money and indentured servitude can buy, make it long enough for the jet to be able to (with the help of high-tech japanese chip technology) accelerate across the sound barrier while in the tunnel
No, that's a really stupid idea. A related and much better idea i have seen proposed would be a mag-lev train tunnel that's drawn to a vacuum. I think they were estimating speeds peaking at about mach 15 for underwater transcontinental travel.
But this brings up another important point. Supersonic flight through air is horribly inefficient when compared to subsonic flight through air (or flight through a vacuum). The fuel and wear&tear costs of supersonic flight are a much larger hurdle than public policy.
Remember, Tokyo and New York time zones are 14 hours apart.
If you leave New York at noon, the trip would take six hours so the traveller would feel that it was 6pm, but local time would be 8am. You'd be ready to stop working for the day just when your counterparts are ready to get started. The same basic problem happens in the other direction.
You either need some downtime upon arrival in order to adjust (in which case, why hurry up to wait?) or whoever travels will be at a disadvantage.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Just make another security line devoted to them. They are going to be willing to pay more, probably a lot more, it's no problem to roll dedicated security in to the package. You don't get any harder or easier screening than anyone else, but it's a special section just for passengers on that flight and thus goes much faster.
Or perhaps just better hardware. They have devices now that are essentially CT scanners for screening. They can you and your luggage rather quickly for all sorts of things, including non-metalic items. They can also see through your clothes, hence lots of privacy concerns. Between that and the price they are not really being adopted but again, price isn't a big deal and you could be told that's part of the package. The screener can see a ghosty white hazy image of your naughty bits if they want, but in turn you are screened in about 5 seconds with no need to take anything off, or even put your bag on a scanner.
Its happened quite a few times. Air Transat Flight 236 ran out of fuel over the atlantic ocean, and the pilots managed to glide the aircraft (with 306 passengers and crew) to a successful unpowered touchdown in the Azores. This incident holds the record for the longest glide by a widebodied aircraft (19 minutes or 120KM). Aircraft do not 'drop like rocks'.
Dismissing a potentially bad situation by tagging it with a cute name like "yellow peril" doesn't dismiss the reality. You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you. The Japanese, Chinese and Koreans work under a different set of moral and ethical rules from the US. If Chirstopher Warren had read the book, "The Asian Mind Game" he would have been less likely to give the game away. (This is not the only book to read on the subject, but it is highly accessible information.)
As for the US being capable of building an SST: It requires knowledge, know-how and motivation. If one of the criteria is an economic boundary, and if we don't have the ability to do it within that economic boundary, then we are simply not capable of doing it. However, many of our products were not economical to start with and only became that way after years of improvement. The Japanese started off after WWII with NOTHING (pictures show them bombed to rubble), and they used equipment that was not economical by US standards to get the know-how and technology to develop economical means of producing the products. They used worn-out manufacturing equipment from Europe and the US, applied lots of manpower and took over small things like lightbulb fixtures and lamps and simple electric appliances like irons, then moved into higher tech stuff like radios and black and white TV's. By ceding these industries to the Japanese we lost much valuable research and know-how, and now we can't compete. The Japanese and Chinese are continually engaged in what we in the US call "illegal industrial espionage" and it is simply a strategy of war as applied to business for them.
Our top students don't rank among the top 10 in the world, and I've interviewed high-school grads and college students whose math was so bad they couldn't operate a cash register. See John Taylor Gatto, "The Underground History of American Education" for some interesting insights on that situation.
The Japanese won't care if their SST damages the ozone layer anymore than they care that their logging is destroying Indonesia and Brazil. The only advantage to them for environmental concern is that it gives them an economic advantage over the US. The Chinese are even worse.
Actually, I expect a lot of nations to be mining the moon, particularly when the orbital manufacturing plants need raw materials. It will mostly be mined by Japanese and Chinese robots because the US will not have the technology.
US students and workers seldom work as hard or as purposefully as Orientals in our country. I know dozens of Chinese and Koreans who make what I would call unreasonable compromises in order to conserver their capital. A Vietnamese immigrant to Houston and his wife earned pitiful pay and lived in the back of their cousin's pastry shop for 3 years to earn the down payment to buy it. Then they lived there for another year to finish paying it off. (They are millionaires now.) One of the most successful computer chains in town is owned by a Korean couple who started off building computers in their apartment kitchen, and up 'til a couple of years ago they were housing 12 family menmbers in a 3-room house. During the winter they would all live in the living room and kitchen to keep expenses down. (Millionaires again.) My ex-girlfriend's family came from Hong Kong where credit was mostly non-existent. They buy stuff with cash (including their home), only buy the minimum and save every cent they can for capital investment. After the girfriend got out of the US Army, she took 22 hours per semester and graduated in 2 years and 8 months, plus she worked 22 hours per week at HEB as a grocery cashier. Her first job as a programmer paid her only 30K per year, and she saved over half of it. At 26 years old she had $75,000 in cash and investments. This is not exceptional; I met dozens of Hong Kong immigrants and they all had the same behavior. The best thing that's happening for the US is that we are exporting our laziness and spending habits to Japan, China and Korea. If we are successful they will become Americanized before they have a chance to completely dominate us economically.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I thought they stopped doing that because the radiation was more intense when flying near the poles.
I fail to see what available seats have to do with whether anyone actually uses the service, though, hopefully, the more seats the cheaper the price. But still, even this doesn't guarantee anything. This is, after all, the age of web conferencing. What is the point anymore of someone traveling halfway around the world just to press the flesh? I hope these folks have done more extensive analyses of potential sales than the poster has. Personally, I see this as more of a boon to tourism than a business service, and that is almost totally dependent on price and service. I do wish them luck, though.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."