The Forgotten American Concordes - Boeing 2707 - Lockheed L-2000 SST

Curious Droid presents America's forgotten Concordes the planes that never flew. When we think of supersonic passenger air travel most people will think of concorde, the joint British French design plane which operated from 1976 until 2003 and up until this day has been the only long-term supersonic passenger jet service to operate anywhere in the world. What many people don't know is that in the 60's and 70's there were three other competing designs from United States and Russia. The Russian Tupolev Tu 144 was the first commercial supersonic transport aircraft or SST which had its first flight two months before concorde on the 31st of December 1969, however after a crash at the Paris Air Show in 1973 and another in 1978 it was grounded after just 55 flights, although it has remained in service as a research platform well into the 1990's. The other two American designs are less well known about because despite a huge government backing and that supersonic transport was meant to be the next big thing after the moon landings neither of the designs by Boeing and Lockheed made it into the air. The story started in 1962 when the British and French governments announced that they will jointly build a new airliner that could travel at twice the speed of sound and which would be called concorde. This was to be the most advanced civilian aircraft in the world showing that European aircraft manufacturers could create the most leading edge designs something that the Americans believed they were the best at. When President John F Kennedy found out that Pan-Am wanted to buy Conchords he was so annoyed that he called at the Pan Am boss who told him that if there was an American alternative he wouldn't have to go to Europe to buy the planes he wanted. To meet this new challenge and to rescue American national pride President John F Kennedy stated that America would build his own supersonic transport aircraft and that it would be both bigger and faster than the European design. Two designs one from Boeing and another one from Lockheed were selected for further development and as an incentive the US government said it would pay a 75 percent of the program's cost. The lockheed L-2000 design was almost a scaled-up concorde intended to fly up to Mach 3 or 2,300 miles an hour while carrying 278 passengers for a range of 4,000 miles. The development of smaller fighters like French Mirage 3 and a russian MIG-21 had already proven the Delta shape wing similar concorde could easily go to Mach 2 and beyond and this was the route lockheed chose. Boeing on the other hand opted for a much more complex swing wing design will be straight at low-speed which would improve at takeoff and landing and then swing back to become a delta wing as the speed increased. Boeings 2707 design were supposed to be out fly at Mach 2.7 or 2,300 mph and carry more than 270 passengers for more than 4,200 miles. After much testing the Boeing 2707 design was chosen as a winner on the 1st of January 1967. Progress though was far from smooth. One of the main features at the 2707 was meant to have was its ability to fly hundreds of miles an hours faster than concorde but this being created huge implications for the plane. Kit Mitchell who was the principal scientific officer at the Royal Aeronautical Establishment (RAE) in the 1960's also worked on Concorde. Kit said that the Boeing 2707's main problem was but it was trying to do too much and so much of the technology of it was required was still in its infancy. Military jets could fly supersonic but even then it was only for a few minutes at a time and not for a four-hour flight times like the airliners expected to. The technology required to do this in the 1960's was almost as much of a challenge are sending a man to the moon. Concorde got around many of these issues because even though it flew at Mach 2, it wasn't so far as to require exotic materials and brand new untested designs. Concorde was effectively the next step up from the V- Bombers which the British had already developed. One of the biggest issues was the extra speed that was required. Concorde flow at Mach 2 or 1350 mph the Boeing was meant to fly 650 miles an hour faster. Due to compression of the air many of the fuselage parts on Concorde were heated to over 100C and the nose tip alone reached a 127C when cruising at Mach 2. The body of concorde was 300mm or approximately one foot longer at supersonic speeds than it was when it was on the ground. This expansion and contraction of the body could lead to metal fatigue if not carefully maintained. It also meant that concorde had a relatively short airframe life of 45,000 hours compared to 100,000 hours for a Boeing 747 and that would have an impact on the overall running costs for the airlines. Everything from the window seals to be electrical wiring had to be designed for a "hot" plane. Because the Boeing was going to travel so much faster they couldn't use aluminium but instead the plane will be made from titanium which would also push up costs dramatically. Also the swing wing design which worked well on smaller two seater fighters when scaled up to a 300 seater airliner, needed to be so big and strong that it made the plane too heavy to be viable. so after huge amount of work the designers had to drop the swing wing design and returned to the drawing board and go back to the delta wing design of the lockheed and Concorde. By the time the Concorde was in flight testing and the Boeing was still in the design phase people had become all too aware of a sonic boom created by these planes and it was going to be too much for problem and as such supersonic flight over land was banned in most countries. This meant that the only viable routes were over the Atlantic from the east coast of the United States to the west coast in Europe. With these limited routes the amount of seats that could be sold was greatly reduced and the prospect of supersonic flight was dealt a huge blow. But what really finished the Boeing end the Concorde In end, even before the one and only crash of the Air France Concorde in 2000 was the cost of the fuel and traveling at supersonic speed uses a lot of it. With the inefficiency of jet engines at low speeds concorde burned two tons of fuel just taxiing to the runway and the Boeing also going to be a very hungry plane to operate. The thinking at the time was that if you could fly to your destination in half the time, then you could do twice as many journeys and charge a premium, so fuel efficiency was not a top priority. When the supersonic designs were created in the 1960's fuel was cheap but by the time in 1970's arrived when they were due to be coming into service the price had risen together with the recession of 1971 and government cutbacks, it ended up terminating the Boeing 2707 project. The two Boeing prototypes were never finished and with both the loss of a government contracts and recession of the civilian aviation market, Boeing ended up cutting over 60,000 jobs. The Boeing 2707 became known as the plane almost ate Seattle as a result of the mass layoffs and with so many people moving away from the city in search of work, a billboard was erected near Sea-Tac airport in 1971 that read the "Will the last person leaving Seattle - turn out the lights". Ironically the plane that saved Boeing from going bankrupt was originally thought of as just a stopgap measure while supersonic planes took over air travel. That plane was the Boeing 747 jumbo jet. Despite the project's failure Boeing learned a lot from the 2707 and much of it made its way into other experimental vehicles but the aerospace giant built in the following decade including some of the unmanned vehicles built in recent years. The supercritical wing designed to tweak that came out to be 2707 project and is now routinely used on modern airliners to limit shock waves and reduce drag. While lockheed's ill-fated L-2000 design will also live on thanks to a collaboration between NASA and lockheed to fly an experimental demonstrator to research the future of supersonic aircraft, so maybe in years to come US built supersonic airliner will finally take to the skies. Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed the video, if you did then don't forget please thumbs up and subscribe for more and if you have any ideas for videos you like to see please let us know in the comments below.

Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 3,673,795

Rating: 4.8736725 out of 5

Keywords: American Concorde, SST, Boeing 2707, Lockheed L-2000, curious-droid.com, supersonic, concorde, sonic boom, seattle, 2707, lockheed, american, supersonic transport, plane, boeing, aviation, tu-144, airplane, tupolev, nasa, boeing 2707 sst, l-2000, Air France, pan am, supersonic transport aircraft, Tupolev Tu-144, supersonic transport (aircraft type), swing wing, planes that never flew, american sst, supersonic passenger jet, forgotten planes, concordski, super critical wing, paul shillito

Id: cG2cxdTfASw

Length: 9min 21sec (561 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/StrangeWill]

The swept wing, which worked well on two seat fighters.

You mean that had pretty much all the same problems. ;)

[u/the_letter_6]

"...like the French Mirage III..."

shows F-102s

Cool video though. Miss a lot of those VHS-era documentaries, we don't seem to get information like that anymore.

[u/beebeethebulldog]

That Music.

[u/jigielnik]

They were forgotten because they never existed...

[u/TheLandOfAuz]

What's that all sexy as hell aircraft at 8:26??