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NASA Has a Way to Cut Your Flight Time in Half (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg Businessweek article: For almost a half-century there's been a clear speed limit on most commercial air travel: 660 miles per hour, the rate at which a typical-size plane traveling at 30,000 feet breaks the sound barrier and creates a 30-mile-wide, continuous sonic boom. That may be changing. In August, NASA says, it will begin taking bids for construction of a demo model of a plane able to reduce the sonic boom to something like the hum you'd hear inside a Mercedes-Benz on the interstate. The agency's researchers say their design, a smaller-scale model of which was successfully tested in a wind tunnel at the end of June, should cut the six-hour flight time from New York to Los Angeles in half. NASA proposes spending $390 million over five years to build the demo plane and test it over populated areas. The first year of funding is included in President Trump's 2018 budget proposal. Over the next decade, growth in air transportation and distances flown "will drive the demand for broadly available faster air travel," says Peter Coen, project manager for NASA's commercial supersonic research team. "That's going to make it possible for companies to offer competitive products in the future." NASA plans to share the technology resulting from the tests with U.S. plane makers, meaning a head start for the likes of Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and startups such as Boom Technology and billionaire Robert Bass's Aerion. [...] NASA is targeting a sound level of 60 to 65 A-weighted decibels (dBa), Coen says. That's about as loud as that luxury car on the highway or the background conversation in a busy restaurant. Iosifidis says that Lockheed's research shows the design can maintain that sound level at commercial size and his team's planned demo will be 94 feet long, have room for one pilot, fly as high as 55,000 feet, and run on one of the twin General Electric engines that power Boeing Co.'s F/A-18 fighter jet.
Part of the reason it wasn't commercially viable was that it had limited route availablility -- it could not go supersonic over CONUS, so was limited to JFK-LHR and JFK-CDG. If the sonic boom is reduced to non-invasive levels, then suddenly more routes become feasible... LAX-, ORD-, SFO- etc...
Also, engine technology has improved quite a bit since the Concorde was designed.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
They are holding Obamacare down in the tub and slitting it's wrists as we speak.
Engine technology has improved for subsonic aircraft. You can't make a high-bypass geared turbofan go supersonic. It just isn't designed for that. It'll tear itself apart if it doesn't first choke on it's own shockwave. Modern engines are designed to cruise at 500 miles per hour while sipping as little fuel as mechanically possible.
The only commercially available engine we have right now for going supersonic is the JT8D design and it's derivatives ... and the core ideals of that design is pushing 50 years old at this point. JT8Ds are loud dirty gas guzzlers whose usage is forbidden at pretty much every major U.S. and European airport specifically because it's so loud and dirty.
As someone who lived in Reading, UK, during the 1990s, directly under the flight path of Concorde, I can safely say you're completely wrong. The noise pretty much drowned out everything and made even a regular conversation impossible.
The sonic boom issue was underplayed by the UK governments and airline industry for somewhat obvious reasons. As for the idea that the Americans were spreading FUD: they had no reason to. They had supersonic designs, they even persuaded the US government to start planning a network of airports to support SS flight linked with HSR (they actually broke ground on one in the Everglades, never finished due to the collapse of the market); if the market for supersonic travel had taken off they'd have had ample opportunity to make more sales.
It's noisy. Really noisy. You don't want current tech supersonic planes flying over your home, believe me you don't.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Fuel cost is a lot less than that. For example, only 15% of American Airlines current operating expenses are fuel. Here are the figures for anyone who is interested:
http://www.aviationdb.com/Aviation/FuelExpenseByCarrier.shtm
I wanted to say: I believe it when I don't hear it.