Despite the promise of two-hour flights from New York to Los
Angeles, the supersonic airline industry never really got off the ground. That
is largely because of physics: specifically, the sonic boom, the thunderclap
noise made when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier, which essentially doomed supersonic
aviation as a viable business.
اضافة اعلان
In 1960s-era tests, booms reportedly broke windows, cracked
plaster and knocked knickknacks from shelves; in 1973, the Federal Aviation
Administration forbade civilian supersonic aircraft from flying over land. Planes
could go supersonic only over the ocean — most famously, the Concorde, the
sleek British-French passenger plane that flew a handful of routes in less than
half the average time. But potentially lucrative overland routes were
off-limits, restricting supersonic travel’s business prospects.
NASA and aviation entrepreneurs, however, are working to change
that, with new aircraft designed to turn the boom into a “sonic thump” that is
no louder than a car door being slammed 20 feet away. That may induce the FAA
to lift the ban, which could allow for two-hour coast-to-coast supersonic
flights.
“The main reason NASA is working on this is to enable regulation
for supersonic flight,” said Craig Nickol, NASA’s low-boom flight demonstration
project manager. “The main objective is to open up new markets.”
The supersonic age dawned Oct. 14, 1947, when Chuck Yeager broke
the sound barrier while piloting the rocket-powered Bell X-1 over the Mojave
Desert. In the following decades, the barrier was also broken by a succession
of military jets, once by a passenger airliner (during a test flight of a
Douglas DC-8 in 1961) and, ultimately, by regular commercial service from the
Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 and the Concorde, both long defunct.
The far more successful Concorde mostly traveled trans-Atlantic
routes at about $6,000 to $7,000 per ticket for a 3 1/2 hour flight in a
cramped, noisy cabin, which was nonetheless considered glamorous. The
Champagne-and-caviar flights were discontinued in 2003 after 27 years of
intermittent profitability and one crash that killed 113 people. What the
Concorde’s chief pilot called “the airliner of the future” was consigned to the
past.
But the possibility of a supersonic renaissance was arriving
even as the Concorde was on its way out. The slide rules and log tables used to
design it had been pushed aside by supercomputers, which enabled engineers to
test and tweak virtual aircraft designs comparatively cheaply and quickly.
That is exactly what DARPA, the research and development wing of
the U.S. Defense Department, and NASA did in 2003 with the Shaped Sonic Boom
Experiment, which confirmed that computer-designed modifications to a Northrop
F-5E jet would hush the sonic boom in the way the software forecasted.
“We flew it and measured it, and our model predicted the boom
very well,” Nickol said. “It was the first time we could prove that we could
shape the sonic boom in a way we could predict.” That demonstration set the
course for research to follow.
Taming the boom is complicated. Air has substance, which an
aircraft slices through, much as a boat moves through water. A plane pushes air
aside as it flies, creating ripples of air pressure. As an aircraft approaches
the speed of sound, pressure builds up on surfaces like the nose and tail,
creating waves of high pressure in front and low pressure behind. At the speed
of sound, waves pile up and combine to reach the ground as an abrupt change in
pressure that is heard as that thunderclap sound.
“It’s the change in the pressure that makes the sound,”
Alexandra Loubeau, a NASA acoustics engineer, said. And that boom happens not
just when a plane first breaks through the sound barrier; it also trails the
jet continuously, like a boat’s wake.
NASA research led to the X-59 QueSST (for Quiet Supersonic
Technology), a needle-beaked aircraft with lift and control surfaces spread
over the 100-foot fuselage, of which 33 feet are nose.
The shock waves of a sonic boom cannot be avoided completely,
but by minimizing the surfaces where pressure builds up — like the air intake
and control surfaces — and spreading them over the length of a fuselage, shock
waves can be reduced, shaped and aimed.
“You can modify the aircraft to alter what the wave looks like
when it hits the ground,” Nickol said. “What we are doing is trying to spread
those waves out and make them weaker.”
NASA is not alone in trying to reestablish supersonic travel.
Blake Scholl, CEO of the Denver-based company Boom Supersonic, has declared an
audacious goal of delivering passengers anywhere in the world within four hours
for $100. He said Boom would begin with international transoceanic supersonic
service so that it would not have to worry about noise or wait for regulation
changes, although domestic routes would mean more passengers, giving the
business “a huge boost, a factor of two or three times in opportunity,” he
said.
Scholl added that he thought that just making faster aircraft
would not create a sustainable supersonic business; planes must also be faster,
cheaper and eco-friendly. The effort “has to be 100 percent carbon-neutral,” he
said.
A handful of companies have proposed private supersonic business
jets to whisk international bankers, CEOs and hedge fund managers around the
globe in swift, exclusive opulence. But despite the stated intentions of established
players such as Gulfstream and credible upstarts like Spike Aerospace, private
supersonic jets have yet to streak across the skies.
The chief barrier appears to be economic. It is the norm for
aircraft to take longer and cost more to build than projected, and private
supersonic jets are no exception.
NASA has government backing and shares much of its research so
that any aerospace company can benefit from it, although it does not work with
any specific airline or manufacturer. But without government financing, it is
tougher for companies like Gulfstream and Boom.
There is a cautionary tale in the experience of Aerion
Supersonic, a company of aviation veterans that was underwritten by billionaire
Robert Bass, in partnership with Boeing, and that claimed preorders of $11.2
billion. Unable to raise enough cash to keep the doors open, Aerion shut down
in May and is now being liquidated in a Florida court.
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