DailyDirt: Flying Faster Than The Speed Of Sound
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Supersonic flights haven’t been available to the public since the Concorde (and the lesser known Tupolev Tu-144) stopped flying. The economic reality of flying faster than the speed of sound doesn’t look too profitable, but maybe someday an airline will figure out a way to do it (and do it safely AND quietly). Or maybe we should just look forward to riding trains inside evacuated tubes.
- NASA is looking to design “low boom” (aka quieter) supersonic planes. The Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) project will be just the first part in a series of ‘X-planes’ for NASA’s New Aviation Horizons initiative. [url]
- A hypersonic cargo plane has been patented by Airbus — with claims to reach Mach 4.5 (much faster than a Concorde at Mach 2). To reduce the sonic boom, the plane has a rocket engine to boost it nearly vertically so that the sonic boom would dissipate in the upper atmosphere — and turbojets and ramjets would provide horizontal thrusts at appropriate altitudes. [url]
- If you were thinking it’d be great to ride in a hypersonic plane with a broadband wireless connection, you might have to solve the communication blackout problem that comes with superfast vehicles traveling through the atmosphere. If an ionized plasma forms around your hypersonic plane (usually at around 5 times the speed of sound), you might be able to get around it with some special signal processing equipment. [url]
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Filed Under: concorde, hypersonic, planes, supersonic, transportation
Companies: airbus
Comments on “DailyDirt: Flying Faster Than The Speed Of Sound”
The short URLS are all the same, and none refer to the articles. :
URLS broke
All point a time DDT article
Re: URLS broke
Oops. fixed now.
Re: Re: URLS broke
Still broken in the RSS feed, don’t know if you can fix that or not.
Re: Re: Re: URLS broke
Well.. it’s “fixed” in the current RSS feed, but I think if your RSS reader doesn’t update, then… there’s not a lot we can do about it now.
Hmmm
Well, I hope that the Airbus patent is more than “put rockets on a jet” because that boat left the dock decades ago. 🙂
However, knowing patents like we all do, I doubt it’s even that much.
If I’m at Mach 5, I won’t get cranky about not having in flight wifi.
Re: Re:
Really, at this speed you’d get to the destination before you even finish typing the password and authenticating the connection.
Patents
A hypersonic cargo plane has been patented by Airbus
Patented – but not built. So Airbus can just write up some papers with nothing to back it up, and now nobody else can do this for 25 years. Great.