It’s my leg and we’re cruising along at .80 Mach when New York Center tells us:
“Boxhauler 61 give me your best forward speed.”
“Roger, best forward speed.”
I always wonder why they phrase it that way. It’s not like I’m going to put it in reverse and go backwards.
We must be leading the pack into Newark because they’re trying to make space behind us. I reach down to “the box” as we call the FMS (Flight Management System). I bring up the “Cruise” page, type in .82 where it currently says .80 and hit the “Execute” key. The plane dutifully picks up a few extra knots of ground-speed. I bring up the “Prog” (progress) page and it says we’ll get to Newark a whole minute earlier than we would have at .80 Mach. Woo hoo! I’ll get my nap that much sooner!
The next time your flight pushes back 20 minutes late and you think they’re going to make it up with airspeed, guess again. On a 1-hour flight we can only make up a minute or two by speeding up. Our cruise speed is already pretty close to our maximum speed.
That’s about as fast as we can realistically go today. The 757 can actually do .84 Mach, but that puts our speed right on “the zipper”, as we call the red/black striped line on the airspeed indicator. Then one little bump of turbulence could put us over the line. No big deal except we’d have to do a lot of paperwork. The plane would “snitch” on us and even a little over-speed requires a maintenance inspection. So .82 it is.
I quip to the Captain: “It’s the year 2017, I thought we were supposed to be going like Mach 6 by now? The future was way cooler when I was a kid.”
The Jets of yesterday were actually faster than today’s. A 1964 vintage 727-100 could actually go .90 Mach. It burned a lot of gas and made a lot of noise at that speed. We still did it occasionally just because we could.
Any airliner designed since the 1980s probably won’t go much faster than .84 Mach. It’s just not worth burning the extra fuel to go a little bit faster. Some business jets can go faster than that, but time is money for our corporate overlords. My search for “fastest business jet” brought up the Citation X at .935 Mach and the Gulfstream G650 at .925 Mach.
It wasn’t always thus. When I was growing up in the 1960s we were told we’d be flying around on supersonic transports within a few years, at least until we were all living on moon colonies.
So what happened? Mainly the price of fuel went up. People also started to care about the environment and noise.
Concorde
A plane like Concorde is a tough subject for a writer. So much has already been written about it that there’s not a whole lot I can add.
Arguably the only successful supersonic transport to date, Concorde was an engineering triumph, if not a great commercial success. With only 20 built, it’s doubtful that it ever came close to recovering the massive development cost. The general rule of thumb is that you need to sell 300-500 copies of an airliner to make back what you spent on design, testing and production.
Note that it’s always “Concorde” and never “the Concorde”. Don’t ask me why, it just is. Unless you’re French, then it’s “le Concorde”. I’m so confused.
I have only seen one Concorde. It’s sitting on a stick at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. If you ever get up close to one, you’ll realize it’s a lot smaller than what you thought. The fuselage looks more like a stretched business jet than an airliner.
Concorde sat 92 passengers, 4 across, in what was rather stretching the definition of “First Class” seating. I’ve never been inside one, but the seats look about like “Economy Plus” class on a widebody airliner.
The economics of supersonic travel are pretty simple. To go fast you need a skinny airplane with big engines. That means it’s going to burn a lot of gas an not carry very many people.
Let’s compare Concorde to my 757-200, just because that’s what I’m familiar with.
Concorde would burn 4,800 gallons of per hour at cruise speed. That’s quite a bit, but pretty impressive for supersonic flight. It achieved this by being able “super cruise” long before the F-22 was even thought of. The Rolls Royce Olympus engines only needed reheat (Brit-speak for afterburner) for takeoff and acceleration through the sound barrier. Once past Mach 1.7 it could cruise on “dry” thrust at just over twice the speed of sound.
My 757-200 in comparison sips a mere 900-1,000 gallons per hour and would carry twice as many passengers if it wasn’t full of boxes.
Since Concorde can cross the Atlantic twice in the amount of time it takes the 757 to do it once, we’ll say that both planes are equally productive. Concorde just uses five times as much gas to do it, and we haven’t even talked about maintenance cost.
Now you can see why a ticket on Concorde cost roughly $10,000 one way. Despite that, British Airways did manage to eke out a profit on some routes. I don’t believe Air France ever made a profit with the aircraft.
Despite the relatively poor economics, Concorde could probably have operated past its retirement date of 2003 but for the lack of maintenance support from Airbus (formerly Aérospatiale).
Still it enjoyed a 27 year service life and is a source of pride for the British and French to this day.
TU-144
The Russian counterpart to Concorde was never half the plane Concorde was. Rushed into service as a display of Soviet technical prowess, the TU-144 suffered from safety and reliability issues.
While sometimes derided as “Concordski”, I won’t go so far as to say it was a copy of Concorde. Both were developed around the same time, and there are only so many ways to design a supersonic 100-seat airliner. Air molecules in Russia act the same as their British and French counterparts.
Where they ran into trouble was the wing design. Concorde’s wing is a marvel of aeronautical engineering, allowing for cruise at Mach 2.0 yet still providing decent handling at takeoff and landing speeds.
Tupolev could not at the time build a wing with those capabilities so in typical Russian fashion they came up with a clever work-around. They added a retractable canard that would be extended for takeoff and landing.
The French thought the retractable canard was pretty innovative. So innovative that they sent a Mirage III to get a closer look at it while the TU-144 was performing at the 1973 Paris Air Show . Depending on who you believe, the Soviet pilot maneuvered to avoid the Mirage and departed controlled flight.
More likely the Russians were trying to impress the crowd (and outdo Concorde) and took the plane past its design limits. I never assume conspiracy when simple incompetence will suffice.
Either way, they over-stressed the airframe while trying to recover and it came apart. Not a good start to the program.
The TU-144 cruised at ach 2.15, making it slightly faster than Concorde. It was also slightly larger and could carry more passengers than Concorde, 140 in a “two class” configuration. Concorde normally only carried 92 in an “all first class” setup.
It was rare for a TU-144 to carry more than 50-some passengers on a normal flight, however. The Soviets wanted to cut their losses in case of a crash, so they generally didn’t fly them with a full passenger load. That really makes me want to get on one!
In 1978 an “improved” TU-144D crashed while on a test flight and caused the entire TU-144 fleet to be grounded permanently.
The other problem with the TU-144 was its short range. Unlike Concorde, the TU-144 had to operate its engines in partial afterburner to cruise at supersonic speeds. The Russians can build an engine that makes great heaping gobs of thrust, but they’ve never been able to do it efficiently.
If being dangerous and inefficient weren’t enough, the TU-144 was also excessively noisy on the inside.
The TU-144 made a mere 55 passenger flights before being grounded. Basically this was a plane that the Soviets built to prove that they could, when they really couldn’t.
Boeing 2707
The Kennedy administration proposed a government subsidized supersonic transport program in 1963. This was largely a matter of national pride, not wanting to be left behind by the Europeans and Concorde. Ours was going to be bigger and faster, of course. That’s just how we roll.
Boeing, Lockheed and North American all submitted proposals. Ultimately the Boeing design was accepted and would have been called the 2707.
The 2707 went through about three different variations. It originally to have been a swing-wing design that would have looked a bit like the B-1 bomber. Boeing ultimately abandoned the swing-wing due to the weight and complexity. The final design ended up looking like a larger version of Concorde. It was to have seated 234 passengers and been capable of Mach 3.
The 2707 never flew and never entered service. This was partly due to environmental concerns about the effect on the ozone layer of a fleet of SSTs operating at high altitudes. I suspect the fuel crisis of 1974 might have killed it off anyway.
More significantly, Air Force sonic boom tests over Oklahoma City in the 1964 proved that the public wasn’t going to put up with SSTs flying overhead and breaking windows on a daily basis.
Today it’s illegal to operate at supersonic speeds over the continental US, with the exception of military operating airspace. We used to fill out a “sonic boom log” any time we took the T-38 supersonic in case someone called in to complain that it scared their chickens into not laying eggs (true story).
Government funding for the SST project was cut in 1971. The only thing that remained was the name of Seattle’s basketball team.
So where does that leave us? Since Concorde retired in 2003 there have been no supersonic commercial flights. Every so often someone proposes a supersonic business jet, but nobody has actually built one yet. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Sukhoi/Gulfstream S-21
As far back as the early 1990s, Sukhoi and Gulfstream were partnered on a supersonic business jet to be called the S-21. Sukhoi certainly knows a thing or two about building supersonic jets, but fighters and business jets are very different animals.
It was to have three engines and cruise at Mach 2+ with a range of 4,600 nautical miles. Gulfstream finally gave up on the project, leaving Sukhoi to go it alone.
To the best of my knowledge this project is permanently on the back burner.
Aerion AS2
The AS2 is a proposed 8-12 seat business jet capable of Mach 1.5 cruise. It would also be able to cruise at .98 Mach over areas where supersonic flight is prohibited. They are also hoping that its unique ability of “boomless” cruise at Mach 1.2 might get the restrictions on supersonic flight lifted (the boom dissipates before reaching the ground).
Looking a bit like a scaled up F-104 Starfighter, the AS2 could cut 5 hours off the flight from LA to Sydney. New York to London would take 4.5 hours.
Aerion claims a range of 4,750 nautical miles at Mach 1.5 and 5,300 nautical miles subsonic at .95 Mach.
All for a mere $120 million. Since you and I don’t shop for business jets, that’s roughly double the price of a Gulfstream G650. Plus it looks kind of small so you’ll have to buy a second one to carry your golf clubs.
Aerion claims they will start flight testing in 2019 and be ready to start production around 2022. That sounds ambitious to me since they don’t even have an engine for it yet.
Spike S-512
From the “even less likely to be built than the Aerion AS2” department we have the Spike S-512.
Spike Aerospace is reportedly developing a supersonic business jet capable of cruising at Mach 1.6 with a top speed of Mach 1.8. Range would be an ambitious 5,580 nautical miles.
So far all that exists of this aircraft is some abstract looking drawings. Some show an aircraft with a v-tail and a rather straight wing that I doubt would go supersonic plus a couple of rectangular engine nacelles on top of the fuselage. The other drawings show a tailless aircraft with a sharply swept wing and rounded nacelles on the sides of the fuselage.
One interesting feature is the total lack of windows. A series of small cameras will be linked to displays on the interior of the aircraft.
I wish my plane had that. Especially if I could tell the cameras not to show me the line of 50,000 foot thunderstorms I’m trying to pick my way through. This is my “what I can’t see can’t scare me” theory.
Either way I doubt they’ll be flying a supersonic demonstrator next year (2018). I don’t think they’ll be selling them for $60 million each either. That’s the same price as a high end “conventional” business jet like a Gulfstream or Falcon.
In the software business they would call this “vaporware”.
Hypermach SonicStar
Mach 2? Ha! I’ll build you a business jet that goes Mach 4! Heck, I’ll make it go Mach 4.4!
At least that’s what the CEO of SonicStar claims. I see a few obstacles in the way. For one, the engines he wants to use haven’t even been invented yet.
The S-MAGJET (Supersonic-Magnetic Advanced Generation Jet Electric Turbine) sounds great on paper.
Instead of a normal turbofan engine, the exhaust stage of the engine would drive a series of generators that would electrically power the fan and compressor stages. The idea being that the fan could be driven at a slower and therefore more efficient speed than is possible in a “direct drive” turbofan. The claimed efficiency is 30% greater than a normal engine.
The devil’s in the details of course. This sounds a little ambitious to be flying by 2021.
Maybe some of you financial types can help me here. Are these things always five years in the future so that the investors actually think they’ll get their money back?
I know I sound like a skeptic (because I am) but I’ll believe it when they actually start bending sheet metal.
Boom XB-1
Okay, cynic that I am, this one might actually work. Not a business jet but an airliner, Boom looks like a half-scale Concorde and that’s about what it is.
The idea behind this is that using modern composites and more efficient engines will allow Boom to profitably offer supersonic service at roughly the price of conventional business class.
Keep in mind that Concorde was built using 1960s technology and a lot has changed since then.
Richard Branson of Virgin has an option for then of these, which makes me think it has a chance of actually happening.
Boom has built a two-seat supersonic demonstrator that will supposedly fly later this year. It uses a version of the J-85 engines that powered my T-38.
I think the problem for Boom (and everyone else) is going to be finding an engine with the right blend of thrust and efficiency. Plus it has to meet FAA noise restrictions. I’m not sure that engine exists at the moment and nobody is likely to develop one for such a small production run. There are military engines in the required thrust class, but they’re probably not efficient enough.
The full scale airliner is projected for, you guessed it, 2023.
Maybe my employer will buy some, for when the package has to get there yesterday.
The Future
I make no great claims to being able to predict the future. I think the key to getting somewhere quickly would be to get out of the atmosphere and go suborbital. That would probably connect any two spots on the planet in about 90 minutes.
Easier said than done, of course. I’m told that rocket nozzles that work efficiently in space don’t work efficiently in the atmosphere (and vice-versa). That means multiple stages which means expense.
But as long as we’re talking science fiction, let’s say it would have single stage to sub-orbit capability with a jet engine or two for landing or divert capability. And let’s keep the G’s on launch down to something the average person can handle. If you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big.
How much would it cost? As they say in racing “Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?”