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NASA says the preliminary design review of its Quiet Supersonic Transport (QueSST) project suggests it is possible to create a supersonic aircraft that doesn't produce a sonic boom.
NASA says "Senior experts and engineers from across the agency and the Lockheed Martin Corporation concluded on Friday that the QueSST design is capable of fulfilling the LBFD aircraft's mission objectives, which are to fly at supersonic speeds, but create a soft 'thump' instead of the disruptive sonic boom associated with supersonic flight today."
NASA's commercial supersonic technology project manager Peter Coen explains, in this video, that "the idea is to design the airplane so that the shock waves that are produced in supersonic flight are arranged in such a way that you don't have a boom. You have just a general kind of a gradual pressure rise that produces a quiet sound."
NASA's next step is finding organisations willing to build a working model of the Low Boom Flight Demonstration (LBFD) experimental airplane and fly it over American cities and towns to hear how much noise it makes. It's hoped those flights could start in 2021.
Nah, rather travel in the kind of zeppelin Sergei Brin is building.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 28 2017, @02:20PM (4 children)
That's why I prefer high-speed train travel to all others, because it significantly cuts down all the other time costs you mentioned, even if the time to cover the distance is a little longer. Plus, it goes from city center to city center and always hooks into local mass transit, so getting the last mile to your hotel or whatever is easy, fast, and cheap. The scenery from a train is always better than from a jet at altitude, and you can get up and walk around a train the way you can't in a plane.
Obviously trains don't work too well to cross oceans, so there's still a role for air travel, but for everything else it's awesome.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday June 28 2017, @03:03PM (3 children)
I'm not a fan of flying. But that's more of an anxiety problem. But I do agree that train travel is quite nice. Smooth quiet ride that feels like you're on a plane but with beautiful scenery (after you get out of north NJ). I take an Amtrak train to visit a friend outside of Baltimore. Less stressful than driving and I can sleep, play on my phone and listen to music or even watch netflix.
BUT. Coast-to-coast is not practical. For fun I looked up an Amtrak trip to CA. The price one way was competitive with flying. However, the travel time was absurd. A little over three days total travel time with multiple transfers, one with a 6 hour layover. Compare that to just six hours for a plane.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday June 28 2017, @04:02PM (2 children)
I agree coast to coast is no fun if you're trying to get somewhere and if you don't have a cabin. But the model i had in mind is train travel in europe on the TGV or japan on the shinkansen. The engineering on those is phenomenal--even at those speeds a glass of water won't even jiggle a little.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 28 2017, @06:28PM (1 child)
But coast-to-coast is a large part of the US market. I'm always mystified how seemingly-rational people can claim that the US needs more high-speed rail. Meanwhile, railways in the USA are profitable, while european ones require massive subsidies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 28 2017, @11:50PM
The train only starts to look competitive if you deliberately make all other transportation modes unpleasant: don't construct adequate parking for cars, have bullshit TSA style security burdens at the airport, etc.
Trains are just inflexible and slow for long distance travel.
The only way they make sense is if you design your entire city and suburbs around the train, something most countries do not do.