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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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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.....
There's a great book called Sabre where the flying theatres of AirBus and Boeing are pitted against the new orbital space planes. More seats vs shorter flight times. The maiden flight of the orbital space plane is sabotaged resulting in an explosion. Unlike every explosion to ever go off on a plane in flight the space plane does not fall out of the sky. The passengers are rescued in orbit using a backup plane.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
>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.
Since, despite the unrelenting efforts of "G8" countries to keep gazoline price low, and keep a "gazoline led" economy, the prices are still going up.
:-)), but I would like to see us try to combine some responsibility and some sense of fun.
I believe that the question is not so much, can we go to XYZ fast ? but can we afford to go there ?
The Concorde crash was actually a "blessing" for Air France and British airway, since even with travel prices about 2,5 time regular FIRST CLASS the airlines had to subsidise heavily the flights.
So No i do not expect us to suddently see supersonic zeppelins (if would probably be an "interesting" example of waste of energy
And it is true that the Zeppelins took about 2/3 days to cross the atlantic (and a big chunk of europe), but the experience was closer to a boat cruise (apparently without the seasicness) than the current sardine can experience most of use have in planes.
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'.
Or you could do what the rich and self important used to do in the days of Concorde; fly over for a meeting, and fly back the same day. No need to change your timezone at all; you just end up getting a late night.
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