Supersonic civilan planes of the future

hello aviators sky here and in addition to the video on why are we flying so slow I came up with a continuation a sequel answering the question will we ever fly faster no the end slow flights and boring landings to you well okay not everything is so radical a small trip can be arranged after all moreover in this case I have a chance to argue with myself so let's go back to the era of the glorious Concorde and to 144 the supersonic airliners of the first generation were quite naturally revolution there were works of art flying monuments of engineering achievement a triumph equaled only by its monumental failure these planes were very demanding to airfields and difficult to operate not every airport could work with them their huge engines with afterburners had insane appetites in addition supersonic aircraft are loud very loud upon takeoff the planes were using afterburners which turned the areas around the airports into acoustic hell and breaking the sound barrier was given the whole environment a full scale of emotions from sonic booms this caused an even greater restriction in operations the aircraft were simply forbidden to fly to many cities and the supersonic speed was only allowed mostly over the seas what do we have in the end terribly expensive and demanding in operations airliners with the fuel consumption of wide-body flagships the range of conventional single Isles and finally the capacity of regional planes at the same time this planes could only fly with a huge amount of restrictions check and mate apparently now let's return to our glorious 21st century the world is ruled by economically optimal airliners with economically optimal performance a cheaper ticket is more important for a passenger and cheaper operation is more important for Airlines modern airplanes pursue precisely this goal and are quite good at it in terms of mass air travel considering the problem described above the only trip a supersonic airliner can make faster is a trip to bankruptcy and now a small remark in terms of mass air travel clear that no tourists will pay a few thousand dollars for a ticket to a medium class resort but there are people willing to pay more for better conditions what can airlines offer such people a quick passage of procedures at the airport elegant accommodations in cabins or even business class airplanes when describing the services of the highest class of Airlines in Asia or the Middle East it is widely believed that it all comes from having too much money that Arab sheiks love their palaces so they turn the plains into palaces the fact is that in the pursue of wealthy passengers the airlines cannot offer anything but comfort and all this costs insane amounts of money that the VIP passengers are still going to pay because there's nothing better anyway even the most luxurious Boeing triple7 still remains a Boeing triple7 this raises an obvious question will this people be willing to pay for speed and here everything turns upside down let's go over the main problems with this assumption in mind first demanding airfields and difficulty in operation this is a serious problem that is extremely significant when it comes to a 180 tonne airliner a business jet that has much smaller mass and size will be far less picky second the voracious engines and this problem remains but again we are talking about a business jet Concorde and to 144 competed with other mass passenger airliners and lost to them in this case however the market will be different no one will be seriously comparing the cost per seat between the 20 seat Gulf Stream and the 200 seat Boeing fuel consumption will remain pretty big but it is not so critical anymore third the noise no one has invented the magic pill the take off will still be noisy and the sonic boom did not go anywhere but firstly significantly small dimensions will once again play their part and secondly there may not be a magic pill but some vitamins have been developed nonetheless so it turns out that in principle a small supersonic aircraft is a very real game theoretically at least let's look at this idea in our time the failure of the first generation of supersonic airliners ruined all desire to deal with this concept for a long time all the talks about new projects often came down to a philosophy of a bright but distant future the industry has changed to the biggest players in the field are not particularly interested in any technological revolutions moreover revolutions carry such huge risks that they are simply afraid the prospects are not obvious and failure promises a disaster the logic is simple you do not need to turn the industry on its head you just need to create a plane that is slightly better than that of the competitors and that is all everyone's doing an example of such a policy was the boring sonic cruiser when in many ways a breakthrough project was considered too risky and gave way to an excellent but much more conservative project 787 and so in this world of regulations security and rationality it takes an adventurer to make a supersonic business jet and where can we find adventurers these days that's right in startups the first thought is skepticism a bunch of nerds will take up the case and charged with venture investments and non-alcoholic energy drinks will build a plane well firstly investors are able to provide very decent financing and secondly do not underestimate nerds especially if they have industrial giants backing them up SpaceX is a good example you can hate on them all you want but the Rockets are flying and along with NASA they are working out technologies that would otherwise be collecting dust a supersonic aircraft is first of all a risk of failure that scares the leaders so much but can be taken by the beginners and this is not because they are such incredibly brave innovators but because they simply have no choice other markets are occupied and frontal competition with the Giants is clearly a dead end now we can finally talk about a couple of examples of who and how is trying to break through the sound barrier now let's start with the first this man's name is Blake Shaw he is co-founder of boon technology his company was founded in Denver quite recently in 2014 and started promoting its project of a small supersonic airliner their idea is rather conservative and in some ways repeats the concept of Concorde adjusted for small dimensions and modern technologies this airliner with a capacity of up to 55 passengers in one business class and tan in a VIP cabin will fly the distance of 80 300 kilometers or 4,500 miles due to the speed of mach 2.2 the plane will be able to fly from London to New York in three hours and long-haul flights from Los Angeles to Sydney will take six and a half hours twice as fast as they do now at the same time the cost of a ticket from New York to London and back should be about five thousand dollars quite expensive but much cheaper than Concorde tickets it should also be mentioned that the boom project is not positioned as a super expensive business jet for billionaires but an airliner for wealthy people who take the expensive first-class seats in ordinary planes several venture funds have already invested in the project and Japan Airlines and Virgin Atlantic expressed interest in the future aircraft actually the Virgin Group also made an investment and the guys from Scaled Composites the parents of the space ship series planes and the giant straddle launch are helping with the development so in general it is a big oven guarded gang so what is this boom plane recently called overture it is a tailless aircraft with a narrow elongated fuselage and ogreville wing already a familiar design the aircraft is often called the Concorde 2.0 at the same time it is much smaller and more than two times lighter its fuselage is initially being designed to accommodate only two business class seats in Euro composite materials will be used as much as possible which will improve aerodynamic quality and reduce weight also there will be no droop nose this mechanism is very complex and heavy and with the modern technologies it is no longer necessary as a powerplant it is supposed to use three low by turbofan engines without afterburners rejecting afterburners is logical this mode of course adds some beauty but it is an antonym of the term fuel efficiency the idea to use three engines is a compromise naturally less motors lower the cost of fuel and maintenance but the installation of a trinity allows to get rid of ETOPS restrictions and partially solves the problem of noise on takeoff the takeoff thrust of each engine will be lower now they need to decide which engines will be installed on the aircraft in order to reduce projects risks and costs it will probably be modifications of existing engines another conservative solution the design of the aircraft is quite classic and it does not solve the sound boom problem the good old roar will be weaker but will remain this is probably the reason why the main routes of the company remain over the oceans at the moment boom Tech is creating a prototype demonstrator for testing of all solutions the airplane called the xbone baby boom is about three times smaller than the commercial model it has already been assembled and will make the first flight in 2019 starting a series of trials to test out the systems of the future airliner so the current descriptions and appearance of the boom plane may be corrected due to the results of the baby's work it is assumed that if everything goes according to plan a full-fledged airliner will appear somewhere around 2023 sounds good but the boom airliner seems conservative and maybe even boring we are talking about business jets isn't there anything more interesting well let's look at the second example the area of supersonic corporation appeared earlier its predecessor the asset group was carrying out research in the field of supersonic transport back in the 90s under the leadership of Richard Tracy I mentioned this person for a reason dr. Richard Tracy was working with NASA and DARPA for a long time he was a member of a Global Hawk and x30 projects as well as one of the fathers of the Lear star 600 the current bombardier challenger and who knows what is doing so at one time he was conducting research studies of an airframe with a laminar wing finally seeing the potential for real use Tracy found investors then in 2003 Ariane supersonic was formed technologies continued to be developed and the concept of laminar surfaces was being tested in wind tunnels and at the NASA f15 flying lab in the middle of 2010 this work crystallized into the area SBJ project which a little later was modified and renamed into a s2 and then it became even more interesting ariel announced that they will invest billions of dollars of their own money into the project and with participation of many partners including large airspace corporations the risk became acceptable in 2014 Airbus started to show interest in area and in 2017 Lockheed Martin joint venture with all of its vast experience and technology in aircraft design after some time General Electric joined the project and decided to develop engines of course Boeing got his part as well joining the party quite recently a very serious team now let's get to the description of what they want to create Ariane as2 is a combination of several large streams of aviation thought the first of them appeared in the 1950s at the dawn of the race of supersonic fighters at that time Lockheed investigated the use of wings with different designs and came to a conclusion that the thin trapezoid wing is the best at high speeds the result of this research was the f-104 starfighter the legendary aircraft which turned out to be quite difficult in piloting but was demonstrating an amazing speed performance the design was very successful for supersonic flight and the guys from Ariane were clearly inspired by it the second stream of aviation thought is the NASA quiet supersonic transport or Q SST a project that is important not only for Ariane but for all supersonic transportation it was initiated in 2016 and included computer modeling of supersonic processes blue wind tunnels as well as the creation of the ex-59 flying lab in the early 2020s it is supposed to work out the possibility of reducing noise pollution due to the use of a number of special design solutions of the airframe which in theory should reduce the effects of the sonic boom these solutions are rather unusual which is why the concepts of many supersonic airplanes look so bizarre but their use promises to make supersonic airplanes much better and that is what Ariane strives for besides the cue SST project is being developed by Lockheed Martin the Arians partners which can be very useful and finally the third stream of aviation thought and the main feature of the aircraft supersonic natural laminar flow wing the idea is that the most aerodynamically high quality airframe will be configured so that it will provide laminar flow in a cruise flight such a design should reduce the impact drag friction and turbulent flows on average by 20% this technology is considered to be very promising but so far it is not widely distributed due to the rather high demands for the quality of care craft construction from the design to materials and production so if we put all these projects together we will get the starfighters legacy excellent for fast flights NASA's work on trying to make a quiet supersonic plane as well as the laminar air frame which should further improve the first two the main challenge of the plane and the company is an attempt to create an aircraft that will potentially be able to fly not only over the seas but also over land without restrictions in fact most of the efforts are directed at that the powerplant consists of three low-bypass turbofans without afterburners the concept is the same as with the boom supersonic noise reduction and the ability to fly without etops restrictions however while the first has not yet decided on the engines Ariane has the support of GE aviation they announced the affinity engine project which works at the supersonic speeds and is created on the basis of the mass-produced and beloved cfm56 engine the as2 is planned to fly at speeds of about mach 1.5 at a distance of 4,200 miles or 7800 kilometers the indicators at first glance are quite modest but there is one trump card due to the quality of the airframe the sound boom will almost not be felt on the ground during the flights at speeds up to Mach 1.2 the aircraft is created for 12 passengers in the VIP layout cabin the requirements for quality of aerodynamics strongly influence the design the cockpits and the cabin are located in front of the fuselage that is very elongated and has a complex shape the thin wing has its price there is no room for fuel tanks so they are located inside the fuselage the use of new technologies and solutions similar to the solutions of boom supersonic will also make it possible to abandon the droop nose reducing the mass but the layout close to the f-104 brought with it the problem of this fighter the as2 is likely to be quite difficult to control at low speeds which with modern avionics is completely manageable however the landing performance will not be the best according to approximate calculations the as2 s braking distance after landing will be about 2.3 kilometers or 7500 feet long an indicator comparable to the requirements of large commercial airliners but again many airports can handle it although some of the original harbors or mountain airfields will probably be almost inaccessible for the as2 according to the plants of ariane and its partners the first prototype of their aircraft should appear in 2022 2023 and apparently after a fairly decent test and certification cycle the as2 should enter the market by 2026 I described a couple of projects that are the brightest at the moment although of course they are not the only ones on the horizon the work on supersonic transport continues in many countries there are other companies announcing plans to create a supersonic business jet will they succeed the risks are very high and most likely the majority of new companies will fail but some may yet succeed although the deadlines announced mid-2020s maybe too optimistic but this isn't new startups tend to overestimate themselves in addition we have to consider another big but not often noticeable barrier everything I said earlier in this video is nothing more than a flight of thought theory and assumptions great risks are associated not only with possible technical problems but also with unclear economic prospects in this case it is not the supersonic business jets that are the experimental prototypes as much as the companies themselves big players still prefer to watch or participate indirectly of course they also have a lot of aircraft concepts but for now these planes are just models created to demonstrate the vision of the future of aviation representatives of the Giants involved in his projects admit that they will only be realized decades into the future or rather distant prospect strategically the position of these corporations consists of several main points firstly the market has to confirm that it really exists the desires of rich people are still far from stable long term market demand secondly the appearance of a new generation of engines is necessary there is a lot of options but now most of them are in labs and test stations and the current models are not enough thirdly widespread introduction of supersonic transport will require a significant reorganization of the industry from the production chains and business processes of corporations to infrastructure and regulations it may take years or even decades to satisfy these points that is why the big players are just watching the new players who are trying to accelerate this process so while the first generation of supersonic civil aircraft was more of a demonstration of potential of the countries that created them the second generation will be an attempt to prove that the time for SuperSonics has come if it is successful we can see new aircraft manufacturers first in a very long time and their success may stir up the big shots and then finally we will get the future of aviation we were promised back in the 1960s but the future is the future we will have to wait for it on this optimistic note the story comes to an end subscribe to the channel and leave your thoughts in the comments below fast flights and soft landings to you you

Channel: Skyships Eng

Views: 68,291

Rating: 4.8950682 out of 5

Keywords: Supersonic, supersonic business jet, aerion, boom, supersonic travel, boom overture, boom supersonic, nasa quesst, nasa x-59, affinity engine

Id: sh_gGFLOkvI

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2019