141–150 of 283 posts
If I recall correctly the Concorde used about 2 tonnes of fuel rolling on the ground alone.. I wonder how this new aircraft fares for fuel consumption? I believe the Concorde is a marvel. You could travel faster than the rotation of the earth in it! However I don’t think we need more environmentally unsustainable travel.
If I recall correctly the Concorde used about 2 tonnes of fuel rolling on the ground alone.. I wonder how this new aircraft fares for fuel consumption? I believe the Concorde is a marvel. You could travel faster than the rotation of the earth in it! However I don’t think we need more environmentally unsustainable travel.
Slowing down in general is an easy way to bring down energy usage, but it's often a hard sell.
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> A jet which has not even been flown once might enter airline service in 5-7 years? Considering that flight testing will begin soon, it doesn't seem that unrealistic. Have you got some actual evidence to the contrary? > The whole article is a PR insert. Yes, clearly, but that doesn't seem related to your first point.
Flight testing of a one third scale prototype will likely begin next year. Given they haven't even started manufacturing the full scale prototype it seems unlikely that they can get into service in 7 years. To give a recent example the A400M took 7 years from the start of the prototype build in 2007 to entering service in 2014.
If I recall correctly the Concorde used about 2 tonnes of fuel rolling on the ground alone.. I wonder how this new aircraft fares for fuel consumption? I believe the Concorde is a marvel. You could travel faster than the rotation of the earth in it! However I don’t think we need more environmentally unsustainable travel.
I think the real problem is that the Concorde wasn't fast enough to justify the cost. Whether you can fly JFK-CDG in 8 hours or 4 hours, when you factor in how irritating airports are, parking, security line ups, waiting for baggage, etc, it still takes all day to make the trip. Might as well save several thousand dollars and take a longer flight. I believe they would have to cut the flight time down to about an hour…
Their parallax website is pretty entertaining... https://boomsupersonic.com/xb-1/build
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You would leave a long trail of broken windows and reports from the moment you went supersonic in their territory, charting your trajectory. Threat detection is a network, not a single point. However, if you're moving fast enough and the target is close enough, your premise is valid. They would not have time to react. Cruise missiles tend to be used for those mission profiles.
Has it perhaps occured to any of you that flying at below radar altitude at supersonic or above speeds, would be dangerous and would have no benefit? If the enemy doesn't know you're there, you don't need to go fast.
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I think anybody would be hard-pressed to argue that the Tu-144 saw meaningful commercial passenger service. Neither has Boom yet, to be fair, but it at least isn’t provably a failure at this point.
True, but it was a supersonic airliner, 16 pieces were built and it did have 55 passenger-carrying flights (according to Wikipedia), so if you make a list without further qualifiers as in the article ("second ever"), it's a bit strange to gloss over it completely...
From my childhood I was under the impression that it was a rip-off copy like the Buran.
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That's not the issue. It's the third supersonic airliner, not the second; the Soviet Union had the Tu-144.
Which is what I meant - it was designed and built by the state, not a private company, so the careful wording is probably correct. Although come to think of it, Sud Aviation/Aerospatiale was also a state-owned company, and the BAC wasn't private either, so the nitpicking can go on forever.
I also immediately spotted the oversight of the T-144 which was enough to give up reading the article and just look at the pictures.
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> You could travel faster than the rotation of the earth in it! You can do that in a conventional jet at latitudes far from the equator. You can walk faster than the earth rotates if you're very close to a pole (very very close).
> (very very close). Eh, within 15 miles or so. 4MPH * 24h = 96 mile circumference circle, 96 miles / 2pi ~= 15 miles.