You probably remember the last time you heard a loud boom. When an aeroplane flies faster than sound, it makes a loud bang that sounds like an explosion. It can be scary and even break windows.
Sonic booms are one reason why there aren’t any supersonic passenger planes flying right now. They were also one of the things that kept Concorde from being successful after it stopped flying in 2003. The supersonic airliner could only fly at subsonic speeds over land or near coastlines. Today, international rules still say that commercial flights over land can’t go faster than Mach 1, or the speed of sound, so that sonic booms don’t bother people living nearby.
Now, NASA is working to change those rules by turning the boom into a “thump.” This will allow a new generation of quieter supersonic planes to be built. The government is doing this with a programme called Quesst. It is the result of decades of study and is based on a new plane called the X-59, which made its debut on Friday.
Thunder Far Away
There have been many experimental planes before the X-59. The X-1 was the first manned aircraft to go faster than sound in 1947, and the X-15 still holds the record for the fastest human flight, which happened in 1967 at Mach 6.7.
Along with Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, the new craft was planned and built under a $247.5 million NASA contract. The factory rollout of the X-59 is now complete. It will now go through tests of its combined systems, engine runs, and taxi tests to get ready for its first flight. It will take off for the first time later this year, before its first quiet ride faster than sound.
“In just a few years, we’ve turned an ambitious idea into a real thing.” “NASA’s X-59 will help change the way we travel, bringing us closer together in a lot less time,” said Pam Melroy, deputy administrator of NASA.
Craig Nickol, a senior adviser at NASA Headquarters, told CNN in 2022, “It will be much quieter than Concorde or any other supersonic aircraft that are in use today.” “It’s very long and thin. It’s almost 100 feet long (30.5 metres), but its wings only cover 29 feet.” This plane is easy to spot because of its nose, which is about a third of its length.
The smooth form is a big part of why the plane is so much quieter when it’s travelling faster than sound.
How does a loud boom happen, though? When an aeroplane flies at subsonic speeds, its sound waves can go in any direction. But when it flies at supersonic speeds, it will leave its own sound behind, and the sound waves will push together into a single shockwave that starts at the nose and ends at the tail.
When this very compressed shockwave hits a person’s ear, it makes a loud boom. This effect doesn’t happen when the plane breaks the sound barrier; it’s a constant one that everyone in a cone-shaped area under the plane can hear as long as it goes faster than sound.
The form of the X-59 is meant to keep the shockwaves from coming together. Instead, they spread out with the help of aerodynamic surfaces that were put in just the right places. The plane’s single engine is also at the very top, not the very bottom, so that the lower shape stays smooth and shockwaves don’t reach the ground.
Because of this, NASA thinks that the X-59 will only make 75 decibels of sound when it travels faster than sound, while Concorde makes 105 decibels.
Nickol says, “That means that this plane might sound like thunder far away on the horizon or like someone shutting a car door around the corner.” “People might not even hear the boom at all, and if they do, they won’t be scared because it will be low and spread out, not very loud at all.”
Changing The Rules
It is thought that the X-59 will fly at 925 mph, which is 1.4 times the speed of sound. Before that, the Quesst team will test the plane in the air several times at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. They will then take it to NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Centre in Edwards, California, to use as their home base.
Later in 2024, the most important part of the programme will begin: a series of test flights will be conducted over six home areas across the US, chosen to provide a wide range of weather and geography conditions: Nickol said, “That’s going to be fun because we’re going to involve the public and do some citizen science.”
The plan reminds me of an experiment the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did in 1964. They flew supersonic fighter jets over Oklahoma City over and over to see how people responded to sonic booms.
Something went wrong; up to 20% of people didn’t like the booms, and 4% complained and filed damage claims. Nickol says, “Of course we don’t want that to happen again, so we’re going to test this plane on a limited range first and measure all the booms.” “We will not go out to the communities until we are happy with the performance. We will still carefully control the level of the sonic booms.”
After the X-59 flies over the chosen places, NASA will talk to the people there to find out how they feel about the noise. We want to see if the idea that a 75-decibel boom is okay is true.
The US Federal Aviation Administration and foreign regulators will then be given the information that was gathered in this way.
A New Age Group
NASA thinks that if rules were changed, a new breed of supersonic planes would be able to fly over routes that aren’t allowed now, like from New York to Los Angeles. This would cut flight times by about half.
But because the X-59 is only a technology showcase and not a prototype, we don’t know what those planes will look like or who will build them.
Nickol said, “Any future design of a low boom commercial aircraft for supersonic flight will definitely be different than this, although some of the design elements could translate directly over.” He pointed to the X-59’s extended nose, some of the flight control systems, and its unique eXternal Vision System, which gives the pilot high-definition displays showing what’s ahead since the plane’s streamlined nose doesn’t have a real forward-facing window.
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Several companies, like Hermeus, Boom, and Spike, are working on supersonic passenger planes and hope to be able to fly them in ten years or less. But it’s unlikely that any of them will be able to use what the Quesst programme has found, which is likely to help shape the next generation of supersonic planes.
Nickol thinks that these kinds of planes, which could fly anywhere, would make supersonic travel more accessible, which is very different from Concorde’s high-end status: “If you look back 100 years, a lot of the advanced mobility technologies, including railroads and aeroplanes, started out as premium experiences, but as technology improved and costs came down, they became available to the general public,” he says.
“In the long term, one of the goals is to make this type of high-speed travel widely available. There’s no reason why that can’t happen.”
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