Since the Concordes were grounded in 2003, airliners have been built for comfort rather than speed with fully reclining chairs and even full sleeping cabins with double beds. The goal is to ultimately bring supersonic flight back to the airline industry. Pilots Peter Coen and Wayne Ringelberg attempt to spot an incoming aircraft on the XVS monitor.
Testing the External Vision System (XVS) software on the B200 King Air. To find out, the experimental plane will be flown over populated areas and surveys will be taken with people living below to determine how disturbing the sounds actually are. The designers hope people on the ground will hear nothing more than a mild thump, if they hear anything at all. The pilot will rely on a 4k monitor to see ahead. In fact, the nose of the plane is so long, there isn't even a forward facing window. The X-59's very long pointed shape is intended to cut through the air more efficiently so the shock waves are minimized. Now NASA engineers are attempting to get around the problem of sonic booms with a newer, more efficient design. While 14 Concordes flew for nearly three decades, setting many aviation records for speed, altitude and distance, it also happened to appear on the scene when fuel prices skyrocketed, so tickets for flights were astronomically high and it never regained its development costs. Only 20 Concordes were built, with 14 going into regular service with Air France and British Airways, including the G-BOAG. On March 2, 1969, the first Concorde took to the air from Toulouse, France. This meant that Concorde was restricted to ocean crossings and could not offer super fast transcontinental service to the very lucrative California market. It was hailed as a new era of high-speed flight.īy the time the Concorde made its first scheduled supersonic passenger service in 1976, environmentalists protesting against the noise from the plane resulted in regulations that prohibited it from flying at supersonic speeds over U.S. Arguably the most beautiful aircraft to ever take to the air and the only passenger jet that could travel at twice the speed of sound, the Concorde was able to cross the Atlantic from London to New York in about three hours, down from eight hours for a regular airliner. The damaging effects of sonic booms, and public displeasure over them doomed the only supersonic airliner Concorde from ever becoming a commercial success.
The loud booms that result sound like cracks of lightning and can be loud enough to break windows and scare animals, let alone people. Like the trailing waves of a boat in water, the sonic shock waves form a cone shape that can extend all the way to the ground. Using the schlieren photography technique, NASA was able to capture the first air-to-air images of the interaction of shockwaves from two supersonic aircraft flying in formation.