The Awesome NASA Passenger Plane That Wants To Kill The Sonic Boom

[MIKA27]

The Awesome NASA Passenger Plane That Wants To Kill The Sonic Boom

NASA and its partners keep making progress in their quest to design a new passenger airliner that can fly supersonic without making a lot of noise, one of the main problems with the Concorde. And that progress looks space-age awesome.

This is one of the two subscale models — designed by Boeing — being now tested in the supersonic wind tunnel at NASA’s Glenn Research centre in Cleveland:

The model contains a force measurement balance used to capture force measurements (lift, drag). Depending on the type of test and on the tunnel, the model can be oriented any way. Pictured here, the model is actually upside down.

According to NASA, the technologies they are developing with their partners will result in a supersonic plane with a “sonic boom so low that it barely registers on buildings and people below.”

[Puros Y Vino]

Cool. I'm in the land of the Concorde right now. It's ridiculous that there isn't an SST flying. I remember seeing the Concorde at air shows. It was impressive.

[CanuckSARTech]

I agree. It was a shame when the Concorde was put down. This is something that definitely needs to be done for the transport industry, IMO. All the focus lately has been on bigger and bigger, with the Dreamliner and such. I don't care at all about how many people are on the plane with me. Whether it's 200, or 600, it doesn't matter to me (yes, I know that does affect ticket price however). But, if you were to give me the option of quicker flight, hell yes. I know the Concord flights were gawdawfully more expensive. But, I'm sure that this can be better worked on now. Take a 12 hour flight, make it 8 or 6 or even 5 hours, something like that, cut my flight time in half, and then work on the price point after. TONS of people would jump at this, I would think, especially with the time savings on 12+ hour flights.

[PoohBore]

I hope this happens, as it would make Cuba a long weekend trip rather than the pain that it is now.

I wonder if the Bloodhound SSC guys could use the wind tunnel on their car ?

[Duxnutz]

Looks cool and I loved the Concorde but when airlines are removing magazines from the cabins of aircraft to reduce weight, taxiing on one engine and doing all they can to save money I doubt we will see something like this anytime soon. Fuel flow on modern airplanes goes through the roof at anything more than Mach .83/.84 (83-84% the speed of sound). Just a massive rise in drag approaching and right near speed of sound. Development of something like this IMHO might lead to something like what Boeing were working on years ago where they build a plane that flies closer to the speed of sound but not over it.

Would be fantastic to see a modern Concorde but all the ego driven airline owners of yester-year are no more. Airlines are run by bean counters plain and simple.

[Fuzz AI]

I'm waiting for SBTs (semi-ballistic transport) or sub-orbital aircraft to become a reality for commercial use. Imagine flying from Europe to Aus in 90min!

I've read that Tupolev have been developing a new SST, the Tu-444. Currently in concept stage, it is based on their work on previous SSTs, the Tu-244 and Tu-144 (the first SST).