Beyond Concorde: The Rise and Fall of Boeing's 2707

in another life it might have set the world on fire thundering across continents at astonishing speeds taking the dream of SuperSonic commercial flight and ushering it into reality the Boeing 2707 could very well have become the way of the future better than the Concord in a whole wide range of ways in the brain chart of a company that since become a global leader in commercial Aviation the 2707 was a beautiful machine that had just about everything going for it and when it was condemned to death in the Boeing boardroom wiped off the drawing board with not even a chance to prove itself the world lost that beautiful machine and everything that might have come with it it's no secret we're a bit salty on this one and on today's episode of Mega projects we're going to Endeavor to explain why you should also be pretty salty about it too so join us for this exploration of the Beast that was the Boeing 2707 why the world wanted it what it might have become and why the powers that be saw fit to erase it from history [Music] [Music] unless you've got experience as either a military pilot or a garage engineer with an interest in strapping us to Rockets we're looking at you Peter then we'd be willing to bet that you've never experienced supersonic flight that's perfectly understandable we haven't either and neither have most people on the planet but ask somebody at the turn of the 1960s whether the people of Earth in 2024 would have made supersonic flight a part of everyday life and the answer almost certainly would have been yes ever since American test pilots and general purpa badass cha pushed the bx1 past the sound barrier for the first time the mid 20th century had become a frenzy to develop better and most importantly faster aircraft not just for military purposes but for civilian purposes too the goal of creating a mass-produced supersonic transport or SST plane was seen as a key priority from the United States to Europe to the Soviet Union Not only would such a plane her very real military applications in keeping with the broader arms race of the Cold War but it would also be a major PR victory for whichever Nation achieved the feat first after all it wasn't the sort of Grand National Achievement that an ordinary person could only see on television like a moonlanding or a military Victory abroad instead a truly successful SST would be the sort of accomplishment that the little old lady in Iowa so to speak could personally buy a ticket to ride in the United States the Boeing Company had first begun exploring the idea of an SSD project all the way back in 1952 just 5 years after humans had intentionally flown through the sound barrier for the first time at that time the requisite technology for a supersonic commercial airliner was nowhere near where it would need to be and Boeing knew that full well but they continued investment in research Anyway by 1960 the company had a full permanent research committee devoted to the idea with $1 million in annual backing that's roughly equivalent to $10.5 million today so when newly inaugurated President John F Kennedy did what he did best and demanded to know how American industry the airline industry in this case planned to set and reach its Aviation goals in the coming decade well Boeing was perfectly placed to capitalize on the government's findings by mid 1961 the Kennedy administration's FAA or Federal Aviation Administration had its answer according to director ni halby investment into an SS was going to be of Paramount importance to the point by their logic failure to do so would constitute a last ing setback to American Ambitions this was not a unanimous assessment within the US government by any means Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara one of the most important Kennedy Administration officials of all would contend that the SST was a waste of time and money and that Hal's projections were unreliable at best but unbeknownst to Kennedy and is in a circle they were still in the easy phase of the SST debate the portion of this emerging technological race when the Americans still didn't think they had anybody to race against when in 1962 the US realized that Britain and France were about to merge their own nent SST projects into a real and very well funded initiative the Kennedy administration changed its tune and fast according to halby who was still pushing the SST concept the US would risk losing 50,000 jobs and $4 billion in income if they continue to drag their feet so when the Kennedy administration sent out requests for SSD proposals to lck North American Aviation and Boeing the leral organization was poised to get working immediately Boeing already worked out a few key components to its design it would probably include a swing-wing design that allowed it to adjust a supersonic flight it would probably be made with a priority on transatlantic flights and it would probably have a minimum carrying capacity of at least 150 passengers by the time it submitted a preliminary design in January 1964 those parameters had evolved Boeing's four engine design would indeed use a swing Wing plus high lift devices on the wing edges and an option to stretch the fuselage and add another 77 passengers now it's important to understand here that even in the early days the budding SST industry was swimming against the tide cost projections suggested that a supersonic airliner built and operated so soon would be stupid expensive and face questionable if not minimal Returns the technology for such an aircraft wasn't really all there either and it wouldn't be for a while the Europeans had a massive head start start and the Soviets were ahead of the Americans too meaning that the American public was more likely to get a consolation prize than the first place Trophy and finally the SST program still had plenty of opponents in the k the administration in Congress and all across the American public but even still the US government funnel some serious money into the project which became an even more urgent priority when the US's own unofficial flag carrier PanAm said that it would consider european-made ssts if American ones weren't available in terms of the competition Boeing was clearly the company that had come with the clearest vision for a purpose-built SST the locky entry appeared to ask the philosophical question what if we looked at the Concord copied it and made it bigger the North American Aviation entry asked a philosophical question of its own what if we took our design for the xp70 valky bomber added some windows and put people where the bombs were supposed to go and now to be fair the Boeing design has more than a little bit of military overlap as well the early proposals they suggested would have been a dead ringer for their eventual B1 Lance of bomber which took its first flight just over a decade later but it was still a new design using new ideas and one that seemed far better suited to the task of building an All-American SST rather than a knockoff or a repurposed bomber Boeing and looh were asked to develop their proposals further while North American Aviation was patted on the head and told better luck next time and when the more detailed second round proposals came back for presentation in 1966 Boeing made the faa's choice seemed like no choice at [Music] all when it earns the American government's sign off on January the 1st 1967 the Boeing design then called the model 733 390 was a clear advant an m on anything that Global Aviation could offer at the time leaving behind the ease of production that the locked competitor had offered Boeing had gone in a different direction a high performance aircraft that had the potential to redefine air travel itself we should emphasize here that the plane underwent a few tweaks during the latter development process a timeline that we're not going to recap day by day in this video instead we'll focus on what the eventual Boeing 2707 was meant to be and what a beast that it would have been powered by four General Electric G4 j5p after burning turbo jet engines each producing a full 63,000 force of thrust the 2707 would have hit a maximum speed of Mac 2.7 that's 2,071 mph or 3,300 km an hour more importantly that's over 700 mph over 1,000 km an hour faster than the Concord projected to over carrying capacity of roughly 292 passengers the 2707 would have featured a wide body fuselage with seven seats and two aisles in a 232 configuration there would have been a major Improvement on the airliners of the day it would also have been well more than double the concord's highest density layout and yes we'll be bagging on the Concord for the rest of today's video so buckle up for that with an expected range of 4,000 Mi 6,400 km the 2707 would have been more than capable of transatlantic flights as well as modern day flights from Miami to Brazilia Honolulu to Tokyo and transcontinental from Los Angeles to Boston a distance it would have able to cover in an hour and a half at worst that's just a bit less than the Concord could have done but would have more than enabled quicker and more capacity efficient flights on the route that Concord was actually assigned to and the advantages of the 2707 went a lot further than that since he used high lift devices on the leading and trailing edges of the Wings it would have been far quieter than Concord and the Soviet t44 and was much more efficient in its climb its swing-wing design would have allowed it to fly at subsonic altitudes if need be without losing out on a efficiency and at least initially the plane was expected to operate at a lower cost than the Concord 2 sure supersonic flight would use more fuel but in theory greater utilization of these aircraft would lead to a more efficient industry overall as more and more details about the plane began to emerge it quickly morphed into a promising business Endeavor by October of 1969 a combined 26 us and foreign Airlines had reserved spots for eventual aircraft delivery including 15 for PanAm and 12 for Transworld Airlines plus orders from United American and Delta Boeing believed the production line aircraft assembly could begin as soon as 1969 with a prototype Taking Flight in 1970 and FAA certification by 1975 at the latest but alas the initial optimism around the Boeing 2707 would before long begin to morph into skepticism the first problems came when the International Air transport Association released its own design imperatives for all SSD projects with the goal of cutting down on fuel costs and carbon emissions and minimizing the impact of potentially damaging Sonic booms now these were all good ideas and they were important forward-looking issues to tackle but they wrough havoc on the 277 design first bing attempted to add canards behind the nose of the aircraft then they had to abandon the swing-wing design because it was expected to be far heavier in practice than Boeing had initially believed that meant it would have a dramatically reduced range the company also planned to flex the fuselage but that ended up causing issues with the ability to control the aircraft in Flight which is a rather important attribute to preserve for a commercial airliner by 1968 Boeing had moved on to a fixed Delta wi and reduced the plane's overall capacity to 234 passengers still more than double the average Concord flight but less than have been promised work began on a mockup design and two prototype craft orders from Airlines kept pouring in and public hype grew to the point that ssts like the Boeing 2707 were widely regarded as the way of the future but it wasn't meant to be public opposition to the project was no longer able to be drowned out by the US government's enthusiastic endorsements environmentalists had raised concerns about the potential of SuperSonic high altitude flly flights to destroy the global ozone layer which to be fair humans were already doing more than enough to annihilate on top of that the American public was becoming increasingly concerned about so-called bang zones left behind by aircraft that went supersonic the paperback book SST and Sonic Boom handbook claims that every SST flight would send destructive Sonic booms along a path 50 Mi wide by 2,000 M long and when a real life xv70 flight produced far less damage than the book had projected the focus wasn't on the possib that the effects have been overestimated but on the fact that Sonic booms from aircraft of this size did indeed cause real life property damage add to that statements by presidential adviser Russell train who had claimed that a fleet of 500 ssts operating at 65,000 ft for several years could raise or even double the amount of water in the stratosphere and create what train called a global Gloom not a change of mood per se but a water vapor blanket around the earth that would stop ozone formation increase ground level heat and probably cause a change in mood too as a bit of a byproduct and finally there was the most ironic barrier of all the one that the Boeing Company had inadvertently created by themselves its name was the then conceptual Boeing 747 jet liner and the issue at hand was the possibility for the 747 to offer lower fairs higher carrying capacity and none of the engineering cost or public controversy concerns of the 2707 the 747 had the interesting effect of providing a legitimate exit from the 2707 project for all parties involved the US government could save a whole lot of money while planning to poke holes in the increasingly baged Concord when it finally took to the skies while environmentalists Sonic Boom opponents and other anti- SST Advocates were getting what they wanted the airlines who had plan to operate the 2707 could rework some plans and upgrade their fleets with the 747 while of course Boeing 2 could change their plans while still anticipating a pretty major profit it was already well on the way toward repurposing some of its 2707 Research into the B1 Lancer so even that work wouldn't go to waste with just about everybody given the opportunity for a graceful exit Boeing the airline industry and anti- SST public in the American government chose to lock arms and head for the hanger door behind them they left a couple of 2707 mockups a couple of half-finished prototypes and the Broken Dreams of Aviation nerds like ourselves with all the Myriad failures of the Concord and the tupv across the coming decades it seemed as if all parties involved got proof positive that it was the right decision to bail on the 2707 while they still had the chance and bail they did in one last fitting farewell the city of Seattle emptied itself of tens of thousands of boing employees who've been laid off so many in fact that two real estate agents put up a billboard near the local airport reading will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the [Music] lights now when we consider the decision to cancel the boing 2707 we've got to First acknowledge that based on the information and Technology available to them at the time the decision makers at Boeing did what they had to do in the short term getting the 2707 into the skies would have required major government and private investment where returns probably wouldn't have come for a very long time moreover there were no guarantees that Sonic booms wouldn't devastate the country that ssts wouldn't Massacre the ozone lay or that the 2707 would have fared any better than the Concord or even the tupv which completed a total of 55 passenger flights in its entire service life before being grounded permanently we hear a mega projects maybe more than a little bit bitter that the 2707 never went into production we certainly can't fault the thinking that led to its cancellation however it's now 2024 and we do have the benefit of better technology better scientific analysis and most of all hindsight while we won't use that hindsight to roast Boeing's 1971 board of directors too horribly we do want to at least take a moment and flesh out what might have changed if the 2707 really did go into production first we got to talk about the concerns that directly led to its cancellation and we'll start with the ozone layer according to a study carried out in 1995 by America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and some academic Partners the continued operation of a fleet of 500 commercial SST aircraft would indeed have led to an effect on the ozone layer but not as big as you'd think rather than the ozone devouring Scourge that these planes were imagined to be a full Fleet in continual operation would have led to somewhere between a 1 and 2% drop in global ozone certainly not nothing but not enough to Doom an SSD project like the more vague environmental fears of the early 1970s actually did and then there's the matter of a sonic boom as we mentioned the Sonic Booms that early ssts and Super Sonic bomber aircraft produced were certainly not nothing but as the Concord aircraft proved the effects of such a boom could be managed by going supersonic while over the ocean and the effects were nowhere near as destructive as American opponents had initially feared and then there's the factors that doomed the Concord specifically it's operating costs on the one hand the Concord may not have been a uniformly profitable aircraft but it did have plenty of periods in its history when it did end up turning a profit and overall the 14 commercial aircraft that did see service are today regarded as having produced sufficient returns to justify their operation the delays and cost overruns of the Concord project of course cannot be applied uniformly to the 2707 and nor can the American Carter administration's restrictions on Concord operations that had been intended to protect American aircraft manufacturers which of course Bo was finally while the very visible Paris crash of a tupal of SST greatly increased fears over utilization of the Concord there's no telling whether the introduction of a better aircraft in the 2707 might have eased those fears or even built a reputation on the new plane's ability to surpass its predecessors add to that the implicit advantage that the 2707 would have had by being introduced only after the tuev and Concord ssts had gotten their rough early phases out of the way and it's likely that the early design changes could have further enhanced the 2707 say that the worst did happen the 2707 was beset by all these same concerns and had its initial order of 115 aircraft drastically diminished the Concord ultimately retained 14 of its initial 74 orders keeping that same contract retention rate will say about 22 copies of the 2707 would have been produced and it's here that we get into the other major reason the 2707 might have survived where the Concord didn't its potential to be not a final product but a first generation aircraft that would pave the way for later models as we've seen in the decades since the Concord spent a total of 27 years in service during which time the world saw major advancement in aircraft engineering engine efficiency Sonic Boom reduction and more and while a combination of multinational multi-corp Partnerships and a long series of black eyes around the Concord program were more than enough to stifle any efforts to produce say a Concord 2 we've seen before and since the years of the Boeing 2707 that the Boeing Company is intensely proactive when it comes to evolving their existing line of commercial aircraft a decently successful handful of Boeing 2707 which seemed on track to prove that they were all around better aircraft than the Concord might be enough to hold over the company for a decade or so until technology can catch up to ambition and then that technology begets somewhat more successful somewhat more advanced series of Boeing 27 17s and then Boeing 27 27s and so on as we've seen in mega projects from the Apollo program to the Manhattan Project and more inventions and technological Evolutions that would otherwise take decades can be done in the span of years if the right motivation and the right R&D budget is available and for a company is hungry to produce aircraft as the modern day Boeing Company we can only imagine what a multigenerational SST project might have looked like fortunately though we might not have to imagine for much longer cuz meet the boom Overture brainchild of a company called boom technology that's backed by well-known names like open AI Sam Altman we've not yet done a separate piece on the Overture so please let us know if you'd like to see that but here are the basics boom Overture is a proposed supersonic jetliner with a top speed of Mac 1.7 with the potential to run several hundred viable routes around the world the concept uses modern day technological advancements to enhance what were previously the limitations of 1970s era supersonic flight with an anticipated introduction date as soon as 2029 the aircraft has already garnered purchase agreements for 15 copies from United Airlines and 20 from American Airlines even despite the fact that a first flight is expected to be another two years away at minimum it's with the Overture that American supersonic commercial flight hopes to experience a rebirth and it's here that we find our final two takeaways about the Boeing 277 first the demand for a commercial SSD is still there despite the failure of the Concord and the inability of the 2707 to get into the skies at all modern airlines are willing to spring for contracts before ever having seen the plane fly and second the number of advancements still needed to get the Overture into the sky for example technology to dependably reduce the impact of Sonic booms well these are all issues that later generation ssds evolving from the 2707 probably would have tackled already as the over clearly shows modernizations and updates to the SST concept are there to be carried out and Innovations are there to be discovered had things been just a little bit different all those decades ago the supersonic jetliners of today might have put the Overture to [Music] shame [Music] h

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 143,209

Keywords: boeing supersonic airliner, supersonic airliner, supersonic transport aircraft, supersonic airplane, supersonic plane, supersonic passanger jet, supersonic jet, national supersonic transport program, boeing 2707, american sst aircraft, sonic boom ban, boeing sst 2707, american concorde, supersonic, faa sonic boom, sonic boom, aviation history, turbojet

Id: by0ZoQ8IUTA

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2024