From Madrid to Berlin there are about 1,900 kilometers in a straight line, a respectable distance that can only be covered with an equally respectable investment of time. To travel by plane from one capital to another you need to invest more or less three hours of flight. That now, of course. If NASA’s efforts bear fruit and the aviation industry continues to show interest in what would be one of the big disruptions of air traffic, it may be that in the future the duration of a flight from Spain to Germany will hardly leave you time to watch a full movie.
The key: the supersonic flights.
The planes capable of exceeding the speed of sound is nothing new. In the military field they have been used for quite some time and engineers are already working in a field that goes even further, that of hypersonic flights. In the commercial field, focused on passenger transport, we also have the memory of the mythical Concorde, which inaugurated the first supersonic service for passengers to early 1976 and ended up retiring in 2003 because of its high costs and the shadow it left behind the accident starring one of his units three years earlier.
Beyond the costs or the commercial profitability of the service, up to now supersonic flights have faced a handicap that hinders their expansion in passenger traffic. Are tremendously noisy. A lot of. Too much to fly over populated areas.
On the hunt for data
During the flight the aircraft generate a series of shock waves that merge into explosions and drag that noisy wake along its trajectory. It may seem like a minor matter, but those sonic booms they have been a real hindrance when it comes to expanding commercial supersonic flights over populated areas on land. NASA knows this and has been working to solve it for some time. The result of that effort is the quest mission and its X-59 prototype, a research aircraft made with technology that precisely seeks to mitigate the sonic boom to little more than a “soft thump” for those observing the maneuver from the ground.
“NASA’s X-59 is intended to validate and demonstrate the design tools and technologies that make it possible to create an aircraft with a different shape that alters the behavior of supersonic shock waves,” explains Gautam Shahof the agency’s Langley Research Center. The key is in the behavior of the shock waves, which, instead of merging, weaken, reducing the usual noise in supersonic flights. According to project managers needthe effect is “almost as loud as a car door closing.”
If the Concorde threw a few 105-110 decibels of perceived level (PLdB) on the ground, the target for the new NASA-endorsed Lockheed Martin-designed aircraft is 75 PLdB.
The mission has a clear practical approach that they recognize from the space agency itself either Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, company embarked on the project. Its objective is to provide data that makes supersonic flights over land possible and allows in the not too distant future to “drastically reduce” travel times in the United States or any other part of the planet.
The GE Aviation F414-GE-100 engine installed in the X-59 aircraft.
How?
Well, with test flights over populated regions that will serve to collect data that will later help regulatory bodies to approve new regulations. The idea -[abunda Lockheed Martin](https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/aero/documents/quietSuperSonic/P22-01661 Product Card X-59.pdf)—is to contribute to a framework that “enables quiet commercial supersonic flight ”.
They are not abstract or unspecified plans and they certainly do not start from scratch. The X-59 aircraft it is already advanced And just a year ago, NASA anticipated its desire that 2022 be “fundamental” for the project, with critical tests on the ground and even a first flight. Just a few days ago, the US space agency gave new details about the progress of the X-59 and further outlined that work schedule, which already includes crucial steps for the next exercise.
In a statement In which it reports the assembly of the F414-GE-100 engine on the aircraft, NASA specified what its objectives are. “The engine installation is the culmination of years of design and planning by the aviation teams at NASA, Lockheed Martin and General Electric,” says the agency’s Ray Castner. The engine assembly, designed to propel the X-59 to speeds of up to Mach 1.4 and altitudes of around 15.2 kilometers, will be followed by advances in the aircraft, ground tests and the first flight. For that last, crucial step, the agency is already looking to 2023. Throughout the following years, tests will be carried out to obtain data.
The X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST), about a year ago, at the Lockheed Martin facility.
“The X-59 is designed to reduce the sound of sonic booms to a quiet sonic ‘thump’. This will be demonstrated when NASA flies it over US communities beginning in 2025 with the goal of providing the data needed to open up the future to commercial supersonic flight over land, greatly reducing flight times.” agency abounds.
The first operation in 2023 will be followed by a year and a half of tests to confirm the performance and safety of the ship. Then, between 2025 and 2026, it is expected between four and six tests communities spread across the country to deliver the data to regulators as early as 2027.
Images: Lockheed-Martin, NASA/Carla Thomas Y Lockheed-Martin
