It will be about 94 feet long, have a 29.5-ft wingspan, and weigh 32,000 lb at take-off (fully fueled). The X-59 will be based on a preliminary Lockheed design developed under a 2016 contract with NASA. If the booms are too loud and obnoxious, however, supersonic flight over land will remain a dream. Those agencies could use this data to rewrite the rules governing supersonic flight over land and open the hangar doors to faster-than-sound passenger and cargo travel over the U.S. The communities’ responses to the sonic booms, along with readings from ground and flight instruments, will be given to the U.S. Then it will demonstrate its hushed sonic boom over four to six other cities around the U.S. There it will flyover some as-yet-unnamed California cities.
Then from 2023 through 20205, Phase Three, the plane will make “community response” flights staged out of Armstrong Flight Research Center located inside Edwards AFB. The flights will test and confirm the safety of the aircraft and demonstrate its sonic boom. In Phase Two, the plane will be thoroughly flight tested on the supersonic test range at Edwards Air Force Base. It will be sized and designed to replicate the sonic boom of a small supersonic airliner cruising at Mach 1.4 at 55,000 ft. More on that later.Īfter a successful design review, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works will start construction and then deliver the plane to NASA in 2021. It’s a 150-year old photographic technique for visualizing airflow. One tool they dug out of mothballs and updated for this investigation is schlieren photography. NASA has also investigated ways to boost the aerodynamic efficiency of supersonic wings. Most of the time, the turbulence softens the edges of the boom, but other times it amplifies the boom.
Turns out that turbulence’ role is unpredictable, according to NASA. The purpose of the flights was to determine what role humid-atmosphere turbulence plays on sonic booms. The project, called Sonic Booms in Atmosphere Turbulence (SonicBAT), had the military planes fly a specially configured dive trajectory that creates a shaped boom.
#X PLANE 11 AIRCRAFT DENSITY SERIES#
For example, last year NASA flew a series of tests using F/A-18s from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA will also incorporate into the X-59 all it has gleaned from the latest in wind-tunnel testing, advanced computer simulation, and CFD, and actual flight tests used to understand boom creation and propagation. It is hoped they create an S-shaped boom that creates a mild thump as loud as a car door closing, not the classic double-bang of an N-wave sonic boom. So, NASA’s X-59 will have a fuselage shaped by aerodynamicists so that there will be small and nuanced volumetric changes from nose to tail designed so that shockwaves off the plane do not come together and coalesce as they move toward the ground.
That theory postulated that shockwaves generated from the front and rear portions of a plane as it sped past Mach 1 coalesced or joined together as they expanded away from the plane, creating two thunderous booms when they hit the ground. In 2003, for example, NASA flight tested an F-5E Tiger with a highly modified nose portion and validated one boom-reducing theory. NASA has been studying sonic booms since the X-1 first broke the sound barrier in 1947 and been exploring methods to make those booms quieter. Lockheed, which will be paid about $247.5 million for the single aircraft has a vested interest in supersonic flight it is partnering with Aerion on a supersonic 12-passenger business jet.īeginning next year, NASA will look at its own efforts to reduce the intensity of sonic booms and conduct a critical design review of the LBFD, also called the Quiet Supersonic Technology or QueSST. The single-engine jet will be built by Lockheed’s Skunkworks as they were the only company to submit a bid on NASA’s request for an aircraft. To help with that first issue, noise, specifically the sonic booms generated by aircraft breaking the speed of sound, NASA plans on building its first manned X-plane in decades, the X-59 Low Boom Flight Demonstrator (LBFD). But there are a handful of high-tech hurdles they must first overcome before every carrying a paying passenger: Supersonic airliners are too noisy, create too much pollution, and they cannot meet today’s standards for jet engine efficiency. Several aerospace companies are trying to revive supersonic passenger flight and replace and improve on the Concorde, the British and French SST that was retired in 2003.