Transportation

Is Supersonic Passenger Flight Set For a Comeback?

The return of faster-than-sound flight could soon be a reality.
  • 01
    After the Concorde was retired in 2003, air travellers only had one speed option: slower than sound. But that may soon change.
  • 02
    NASA is working on a Low Boom Flight Demonstration plane that breaks the sound wave barrier without so much sonic disruption; the breakthrough would allow for a two-and-a-half-hour trip from LA to New York. And none of it would be possible without the daring experiments carried out 70 years ago, over the Mojave desert.
  • 03
    On October 14th, 1947, Chuck Yeager officially flew at Mach 1.06—just over the speed of sound—in the rocket-powered Bell X-1, a plane that was first hoisted 23,000 feet into the air by a B-50 Superfortress.
  • 04
    Yeager became the fastest man on earth, and the aircraft became the first of a long line of experimental X-Planes.
  • 05
    The flight was a monumental achievement—the culmination of decades of theoretical work, top secret wartime projects, and in the end, international collaboration.
  • 06
    In the early days of flight, engineers thought it was impossible to fly that quickly. They thought the speed of sound in air—over 700 miles per hour—was a literal barrier.
  • 07
    At those velocities, aerodynamics get wacky. There’s a sudden increase in drag, so planes need more and more power just to keep moving forward.
  • 08
    It also makes an aircraft incredibly hard to control, which is why Yeager’s flight was so dangerous. Shockwaves can build up on control surfaces like flaps and the tail, making them impossible to move. Controls can even flip at transonic speeds: A push to the left leads to a flip to the right.
  • 09
    The X-1 was designed to circumvent the issues by looking like a bullet, a shape that engineers knew was stable.
  • 10
    When an object punches through the sound wave barrier, anyone nearby hears a large crack or boom. The anxious spectators watching Yeager’s flight heard it like distant thunder.
  • 11
    That became Concorde’s biggest problem: The boom was so loud that regulators wouldn’t let it fly over land. Limited to transatlantic routes, the plane was an economic failure. After a crash in 2000 that killed 113 people, and the downturn in aviation after the 9/11 attacks, Concorde was grounded for good.
  • 12
    Now, military supersonic flight is routine, and the mighty SR-71 Blackbird proved that cruising at over three times the speed of sound was easy.
  • 13
    Yet vacationers have remained stuck at the relatively slow, and certainly subsonic, speeds of passenger jets. But companies around the world—Aerion Corporation and Boom Technology—are working on super-fast planes that could enter service within the next decade.
  • 14
    And so, the X-1’s legacy lives—and flies—on.
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