The aircraft reuses parts from other planes, including the landing gear from an F-16 fighter, the canopy and ejection seat from a much older T-38 supersonic training jet, and some of the engine system used in the U-2 spy plane.Įverything about the X-59 is designed to create a quiet sonic boom at the test point of Mach 1.4 (1,074 mph) at 55,000ft (16,800m), which is in the range a commercial aircraft is likely to fly. The fighter-like X-59 is a rather more elegant – and cost-effective – answer to a challenging problem. It was a bullet shape with two straight wings (when it was designed, American aircraft designers hadn't fully understood the advantages of swept wings, such as reduced drag) and a rocket engine. The X-1 looked like an aircraft designed to smash the sound barrier. "You are demonstrating for the first time with a real-world vehicle that you can make quiet sonic booms, and that can open the door for commercial industry to come in and start building aircraft like this." "I think the X-59 could be significant," says Christopher Combs, University of Texas at San Antonio. Despite the advances in computer modelling and wind tunnel technology, it is still too much of a risk to build a quiet supersonic passenger aircraft without real-world evidence that the technology will work. That might be about to change if years of research into how to create a quiet sonic boom come to fruition Nasa and the secretive "Skunk Works" of aircraft manufacturer Lockheed are trying to build an aircraft that creates it. With that ban – and others like it – went the business case for aircraft like Concorde.
In 1973, the US government banned commercial supersonic flights over land in the United States. Only this time, if all goes to plan, nobody on the ground will notice. Now, in 2023, the latest X-plane – the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) aircraft – is aiming to repeat a feat achieved by the first X-plane – break the sound barrier again. The fastest of the X-planes would take their human pilots to more than six times the speed of sound. Flights by cutting-edge aircraft like the X-1 and X-15 paved the way for the eventual triumphs of the Apollo programme and Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. The legend of America's X-planes was born in the mid-1940s and flourished till the 1960s, when rocket planes flew to the edge of space. It was the ninth powered flight of the experimental Bell X-1 aircraft, and onboard the pilot wrestled the controls as the aircraft's stability fluctuated as it's speed increased. In 1947, the first clue onlookers at Muroc Army Airfield, California, had that the sound barrier had been broken was a thunder-like sound, or bomb burst.
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