Oh, Your Private Jet Is Just Subsonic?

zerogeewhiz writes "Found this article here at The Sydney Morning Herald . It seems that Bill and his mates need to move a bit quicker these days and for a cool US$80 million, you too can overtake the Concorde on a dash to Harrods for dinner. As described in the article, the main complaint about Concorde is that it can only fly supersonic over water and creates those nasty sonic booms that punch holes in buildings and shatter windows. They reckon they can get rid of these waves by making the plane longer. These are gonna be fast but hideous. 737-700s are suddenly passe as a corporate jet..."

Extending Length to PREVENT Sonic Booms?

[Rura Penthe]

I'm somewhat confused on this count. Would extending the length of a plane actually prevent a sonic boom? According to Britannica : "If the aircraft is especially long, double sonic booms might be detected, one emanating from the leading edge of the plane and one from the trailing edge."

Has new technology been developed with regards to this?

Concorde Avionics (or lack thereof)

[green pizza]

Have you seen a photograph of a Concorde cockpit? It looks like something straight out of a 707, it's ancient. There's not an LCD, CRT, or even an LED to be seen. The typical "flight computer" is usually the pilot's own handheld PDA, ditto for GPS. If I were going to pay $big for private use of a Concorde, it by gosh better have some real avionics [linuxdevices.com].

Even the B-52H [aol.com] has a nice modernized cockpit with screens galore. If that old clunker can be up to date, there's no reason why a Concorde can't.

For this kind of money...

[Waffle Iron]

... I bet that you could put together a teleconferencing system with close to IMAX quality. It would use a lot less fuel, too.

A dedicated 100-Mb fiber link should be sufficient. Imagine hardball business negotiations in 9-channel Dolby surround sound.

What happened to "Getting there is half the fun"?

[Robber Baron]

Some of the my most memorable journeys have been long train trips. So what if it takes you three days to travel coast to coast? You get to relax, get up, walk around, meet some of your fellow travellers...it's great fun and a hell of a lot more civilized than being strapped into a supersonic missile like so many Aztec sacrifices...

Besides, you know how much we get pissed-off when some Yuppie asshole's cell-phone starts ringing when we are trying to enjoy a nice restaurant or theatre performance? "Look at me! I'm so fucking important that I need to disturb everyone around me!" Well that's just going to get a whole lot worse. "Look at me! I'm so fucking important that I need to smash out everyone's windows as I race off to yet another "important" meeting!"

Anyone know where I can get a Patriot missile battery cheap?

Sloppy Reporting

[hanway]

Concorde is "the world's dirtiest and loudest aircraft?" That's pretty sloppy reporting. It's probably true for commercial airliners, but there are probably many military planes that are louder and belch more smoke. I'll bet that the B-52 is dirtier and the SR-71 is louder.

Eye Candy

[Kozz]

Take a look at a photo of a sonic boom [yahoo.com].

And for the record, the Lameness filter sucks.

One crash means a supersonic age is impossible?

[alist]

"Engineers say the baby Concordes will herald a new supersonic age, something that seemed impossible when the Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris just over a year ago."

Maybe it's just me, but I recall that the Concorde flew supersonically for years before one of them crashed, and the one that bit the dust was due to metal on the runway, not a major design flaw. When the first automobile crashed, did we mourn the end of the age of the car?

Re:missed the point

[RocketRay]

Obviously, you've never been near a Concorde as it flies.

I was in London at Kew Gardens in 1997, right beneath the "draining toilet bowl" pattern for Heathrow, and a Concorde was coming in. At 10,000 feet, the Concorde was louder than a 747 at 2,000. When the Concorde came in at 2,000, it was so loud you had to put your hands over your ears.

Furthermore, the Concorde *can't* fly from London or Paris to Los Angeles. It burns as much fuel as a 747 just to get to New York, and it carries only 100 people. The plane was a money-loser when it was built, and everybody knew it. It was built purely for the prestige which, arguably, it has in abundance even though it crashed & burned last year.

Re:Corporate Interceptor

[spaceyhackerlady]

Indeed - I have read that limited range is a significant commercial problem for Concorde.

When it was designed in the 1960s, New York to London was big business, and was the kind of range you could make money with. Now it's L.A. to Hong Kong, far beyond Concorde's reach unless you refuel. Which kills the speed advantage.

I've heard Concordes take off from Heathrow, and they are indeed loud. They have that turbojet shriek that you only hear from military jets nowadays.

I still want to ride on one.

...laura

Re:Boeing-Su

[dohcvtec]

Reminds me of watching "Beyond 2000" in the late 80's when they had visions of supersonic flight being common by the mid-to-late 90's. It's been nothing but food for thought ever since the Concorde went into service.

Re:Here's a picture ...

[Chris Y Taylor]

The Boeing Sonic Cruiser is a brilliant ploy to counter Airbus's superjumbo aircraft plans. The Sonic Cruiser can be targeted to the much more profitable First Class, Executive Class, and Business Classes. I think Boeing hopes that the airlines which buy the superjumbos will be stuck hauling the low profit "cattle car" coach class passengers only (and all the other airlines will rush to place orders for more Sonic Cruisers). But, those supersonic business jets would seem to cut into the Sonic Cruiser's market share. And companies like Southwest seem to be getting along fine targeting the low end passengers. It will be interesting to see whose business strategy pays off.

Why dawdle at Mach 1 when you can have Mach 3?

[jmichaelg]

Airplanes spend most of their power just pushing air out of the way - their drag rises as the cube of their airspeed. An alternative to trying to push faster through air is to build an evacuated tube between New York and Los Angeles. Put in a superconducting maglev train similar to what the Japanese have and let her rip. Since the tube's evacuated, you're not moving air out of the way so the majority of the fuel is used for acceleration and deceleration - the train coasts for most of the trip.

The maglev train's inventors have posted a proposal for a mach 3 train [maglev2000.com] that would get you coast to coast in an hour and a half. Make the tube ultra straight and you can make the same trip in 45 minutes.

A Swedish engineering firm recently built the world's longest tunnel through hard rock for less than $10 million/mile. If the trans-continental tube came in at around that cost, it'd run $22 Billion. The trains themselves are estimated to cost around $5 million per car - a lot cheaper, and faster, than a $80 Million Gulfstream V.

Re:Eye Candy

[Fishstick]

>This isn't necessarily a picture of a sonic boom

You are probably technically correct, but in this case, the photographer took this picture at the exact instant the sonic boom happened:

Through the viewfinder of his camera, Ensign John Gay could see the A/F18 drop from the sky as it headed toward the port side of the Aircraft Carrier Constellation at 1,000 feet. The pilot increases his speed to 750 mph, vapor flickering off the curved surfaces of the plane. At the precise moment of breaking the sound barrier, 200 yards form the carrier, a circular cloud formed arourd the Hornet. With the Pacific Ocean just 75 feet below the aircraft being rippled by the aircraft's pass, Gay hears the explosion of the sonic boom and snaped his camera shutter once. "I clicked the same time I heard the boom and I knew I had it." What he had was a technically meticulous depiction of the sound barrier being broken on July 7, 1999, somewhere on the Pacific between Hawaii and Japan. Sports Illustrated, Brills Content, and Life ran the photo.

The photo recently took first prize in the science and technology division in the World press Photo 2000 contest, which drew more than 42,000 entries worldwide. Because Ensign Gay is a member of the military he was ineligible for the cash prize. "In the last few days, I've been getting calls from everywhere about it again. It's very humbling." Gay, 38, manages a crew of eight assigned to take intelligence photographs from the high-tech belly (TARPS POD) of an F-14 Tomcat. In July, Gay had been part of a Joint Task Force Exercise as the Constellation made its way to Japan.

Gay used his personal Nikon 90 S, set his 80-300 mm zoom lens on 300 mm, his shutter speed at 1/1000 of a second and the aperture at F5.6. "I put it on full manual," Gay said. "I tell young photographers who are into automatic everything, you aren't going to get that shot on auto. The plane is too fast. The camera can't keep up."

At sea level a plane had to exceed 741 mph to break the sound barrier.
The change in pressure as the plane outruns all of the pressure and sound waves in front of it is heard on the ground as an explosion - the sonic
boom. The pressure change condenses the water in the air as the jet passes these waves. Altitude,wind, speed, humidity, the shape and trajectory of the plane - all affect the breaking of the barrier. On July 7 everything was perfect. "You see vapor flicker around the plane. it gets bigger and bigger, then BOOM - it's instantaneous. One second the vapor cloud is there, the next it's gone."

GPS speed limits

[phliar]

GPS doesn't work at supersonic speeds anyway so there wouldn't be much point in having it.

GPS works fine at any speed. (Well, non-relativistic speeds, anyway...)

A few things to keep in mind:

• Consumer GPS chipsets are limited to 900kt.
• There's no reason a foreign government/company couldn't design a GPS chipset.
• Concorde cruises around Mach 2 @ FL600
• Above FL400, the speed of sound is 580 kt so 900 kt = Mach 1.5.
• GLONASS [the Russian sat. nav. system] does not have speed limits.

But the most important thing is: inertial navigation works just fine - especially if there are <20 airplanes in the world flying at those speeds and altitudes!