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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.
We were told that the Concorde was not commercially viable even when tickets were 5-10x the price of coach for the same route. What will this new design do to put the tickets into a price range that more consumers can justify paying? Otherwise we already have ways to hold meetings in France in the AM and make it to NYC in time for dinner, it's called videoconferencing.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'd rather have a cheaper flight.
Or a more comfortable flight.
Or a more private flight (fewer passengers sat on top of me).
A quicker flight is very low on my list of priorities. Flights are already pretty fast.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
That quote was from Negroponte in the time of Wired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Air travel is noise polluting, air polluting and fossil fuel driven. Half the time, with network improvements, we can make do with teleconferences. In fact, working in Brussels in the 1980s, we already used teleconference to save trips to the computer centre in Luxembourg.
I'm not saying that we stop air travel, I enjoy my holiday too, but we really need to minimise and substitute. I take the the high speed train (TGV) from Paris to Marseilles now, it's 4 hours, probably less than the flight once I've dealt with two internal airports. So, whilst this is interesting research, it should a be white elephant in a greener, quieter, less polluted world.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Doubling speed = 4x fuel cost. My RT flights to India typically costs about $1500, and according to the fine summary BA shows me, that's about $600 for the flight itself, and $800+ in taxes and (government) fees.
So what part of that $600 is for fuel?
Your guess is as good as mine. I'll guess it's half, i.e. $300. Thus 4x or $1200 would be the fuel cost, same $300 for all the other costs, and the same $800 in taxes and fees.
Result: $2300 to fly at mach 1.7 (2x a typical 757/767/777/787/A380, which flies at mach .85). Sounds good to me. That wouldn't break the bank where I work and I could get there in ten hours instead of twenty. Of course it probably wouldn't really end up being ten hours, maybe more like twelve or thirteen. Still, I'd consider that a win.
The sonic boom is not really an issue. The actual sonic boom from Concorde at cruise altitude...posed no real risk.
No, the sonic boom really was a serious issue and was the reason why Concorde was limited to flying to the eastern seaboard of the US. It was not that it was dangerous but more the noise which you can hear in in this video around the 1 minute mark from a plane claimed to be at 50-60,000 feet. It is certainly not negligible and you would not want to be hearing that multiple times a day if you were living under a flight path.
The take-off noise is also not negligible. As a grad student, I remember waiting on a plane to take off at Heathrow one evening when there was a deep-throated roar, the plane vibrated slightly and Concorde shot down the runway next to us with blue flames shooting out of its afterburners. It was a heck of an impressive sight but not exactly a quiet one! While fuel costs are certainly an effect when they were shutting down the Concorde program one expert commented that a plane designed today would be hugely more efficient but that the fact it would still make a sonic boom would limit it to so few routes the market would be too small to make it financially viable. If NASA can fix this then it could well cause a renaissance in supersonic flight.
If I only have to cram myself into a tiny seat and sit there with blood flow below my knees cut off by pressure from the seat in front for 4 hours instead of 8 hours I'd call that a more comfortable flight.
This feels more like something that will be eventually sold to billionaires, people wealthy enough to own and operate their own $50-100 million aircraft. The noise regs meant that a billionaire couldn't do supersonic travel to most places even though he could afford the plane. Get the noise down and now those supersonic business jets can be built, sold and operated pretty much worldwide.