Nasa unveils quiet supersonic aircraft in effort to revive commercial flights
Nasa unveils quiet supersonic aircraft in effort to revive commercial flights
In launch event on Friday, agency shared plans to test over US cities to see if it’s quiet enough by engaging ‘the people below’
No mention of the massively increased fuel requirements for supersonic flight and its climate implications...
We really can't afford the aviations designs for massive growth of the sector.
It is truly despicable that as the rest of global society wrestles with the monumental task of moving away from fossil fuels our tax dollars are funding research to make the problem dramatically worse. I was perturbed enough when I heard the private sector was trying to bring this failed technology back. These researchers should be ashamed of themselves.
But the richest 2% of us need to get to the climate change conference 50% faster. We’re very important & busy people.
Oh joy, an even faster way to burn fossil fuels
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a joint ceremony with Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, on Friday, Nasa revealed the X-59, an experimental aircraft that is expected to fly at 1.4 times the speed of sound – or 925mph (1,488 km/h).
Explaining the configurations at Friday’s launch event, Nasa’s deputy administrator, Pam Melroy, said: “We made that decision to make it quieter, but it’s actually an important step forward in and of itself in advancing aviation technology.
“[With the] huge challenge [of] limited visibility in the cockpit, the team developed the external vision system, which really is a marvel of high-resolution cameras feeding an ultra-high-resolution monitor.”
Melroy added: “The external vision system has the potential to influence future aircraft designs where the absence of that forward-facing window may prove advantageous for engineering reasons, as it did for us.”
Addressing that ban at Friday’s launch event, Bob Pearce – Nasa’s associate administrator for its aeronautics research mission – said: “Grounded flight testing showed us it was possible to design an aircraft that would produce a soft thump instead of a sonic boom.
In the post-launch press conference, David Richardson, Lockheed Martin’s X-59 program director, said that taxi tests of the X-59 were expected to start around late spring or early summer.
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