INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Credit: Lockheed MartinIt may dramatically reduce travel time, but supersonic air travel barely exists
to overcome the one thing that has so far rendered supersonic air travel unworkable: the sonic boom.Cue NASA, and its attempts to revive the
ground-breaking series of experimental X-planes that stretch back to the Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager became the first man to break the
aircraft traveling at the speed of sound
heard on the ground as a sonic boom
In the case of Concorde it was actually a double sonic boom, and it's why Concorde wasn't allowed, by law, to fly at supersonic speeds over
land; it mostly flew across the Atlantic Ocean between London/Paris and New York, and never across Europe, Asia, North America or any other
says aerospace expert Paul Kostek, senior systems engineer at Base2 Solutions and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
In fact, NASA recently struck an agreement with the French national aerospace research center ONERA to collaborate on research predicting
where sonic booms will be heard as supersonic aircraft fly overhead.The X-59 QueSST will travel at 940mph
associate administrator for aeronautics
to predict exactly where sonic booms will reach the ground.NASA's new X planeThe $247.5 million X-59 Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST)
Expected to fly in 2021, the QueSST design will fly as the Low Boom Flight Demonstration (LBFD), with the objective of eliminating the sonic
2022, NASA will perform flight tests in a bid to prove that the quiet supersonic technology works as designed, and from 2023 until 2025 it
will fly the X-59 QueSST over several US cities at supersonic speeds
It will then survey the folks living beneath the flight paths, and see if/how much the flights annoyed them
The data they collect will be passed to US and international regulators considering new sound-based rules around supersonic flight over
land.That's crucial, because all supersonic travel over land is currently banned
As well as trying to solve the tech problems, NASA needs to make the case for updating international law.Can the X-59 QueSST beat the boom
Another such plane is Baby Boom, Boom Technology's XB-1 Supersonic Demonstrator, which is now being built in Colorado
A 55-seat commercial supersonic aircraft, it could make the trip from London to New York in just three hours at speeds of Mach 2.2, or
Japan Airlines and the Virgin Group are early investors, the former having pre-ordered 20 Baby Boom aircraft.Baby Boom is supported by
Mach 5 is a whopping 3,836mph, and Boeing claims a hypersonic passenger vehicle like this could reach almost anywhere in the world within
one to three hours.How it beats the boom is a bit of a cheat
If it ever gets airborne it won't be for a least another 20 years.Boeing's design concept for a passenger-carrying hypersonic aircraft
Kevin Bowcutt, senior technical fellow and chief scientist of hypersonics at Boeing
foreseeable future supersonic travel is likely to be limited to specialist flights, luxury business travel, and national security, and not
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