Slashdot Mirror
A New Engine Could Bring Back Supersonic Air-Travel (economist.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report (may be paywalled): Every morning, time once was, a giant roar from Heathrow Airport would announce the departure of flight BA001 to New York. The roar was caused by the injection into the aircraft's four afterburners of the fuel which provided the extra thrust that it needed to take off. Soon afterwards, the pilot lit the afterburners again -- this time to accelerate his charge beyond the speed of sound for the three-and-a-half hour trip to JFK. The plane was Concorde.
Supersonic passenger travel came to an end in 2003. The crash three years earlier of a French Concorde had not helped, but the main reasons were wider. One was the aircraft's Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus engines, afterburners and all, which gobbled up too much fuel for its flights to be paying propositions. The second was the boom-causing shock wave it generated when travelling supersonically. That meant the overland sections of its route had to be flown below Mach 1. For the Olympus, an engine optimised for travel far beyond the sound barrier, this was commercial death.
That, however, was then. And this is now. Materials are lighter and stronger. Aerodynamics and the physics of sonic booms are better understood. There is also a more realistic appreciation of the market. As a result, several groups of aircraft engineers are dipping their toes back into the supersonic pool. Some see potential for planes with about half Concorde's 100-seat capacity. Others plan to start even smaller, with business jets that carry around a dozen passengers. The chances of such aircraft getting airborne have recently increased substantially.
Supersonic passenger travel came to an end in 2003. The crash three years earlier of a French Concorde had not helped, but the main reasons were wider. One was the aircraft's Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus engines, afterburners and all, which gobbled up too much fuel for its flights to be paying propositions. The second was the boom-causing shock wave it generated when travelling supersonically. That meant the overland sections of its route had to be flown below Mach 1. For the Olympus, an engine optimised for travel far beyond the sound barrier, this was commercial death.
That, however, was then. And this is now. Materials are lighter and stronger. Aerodynamics and the physics of sonic booms are better understood. There is also a more realistic appreciation of the market. As a result, several groups of aircraft engineers are dipping their toes back into the supersonic pool. Some see potential for planes with about half Concorde's 100-seat capacity. Others plan to start even smaller, with business jets that carry around a dozen passengers. The chances of such aircraft getting airborne have recently increased substantially.
So you just need to scale up the F-22 to carry 100 people!
Would still be a cheaper program than the F-35
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
So you have a problem. You need a plane designed to work very well at Mach 2, and it has to be designed to work well subsonic. These are two very different designs. It's hard to have the same plane do well with both. It's kinda like designing an ocean-going ship that's also a bicycle.
A perfect example is the SR-71. The metal in the plane would get so hot and expand so much that they had to build in gaps with tanks and seals. As a result it would constantly leak fuel both on the ground and in subsonic flight and would only seal up once it reached supersonic speeds.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
London-NY subsonic: 7.5 hours
London-NY supersonic: 3.5 hours
Waiting at the check-in desk, checking in, waiting in line at the airport for the security theater, walking the airport's corridors, waiting at the gate, boarding, taxiing, landing, disembarking, walking some more, waiting at the baggage claim, etc: 3 hours if you're lucky. That's assuming flying supersonic isn't reserved for rich fucks who get to fast-track the whole process of course...
Conclusion: if you want people to travel faster, it would make more economic sense to reduce the time it takes *before* and *after* the flying proper.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash