Supersonic transports could eat into the airline industry's effort to reduce its footprint because the planes consume more fuel per passenger than existing airliners.
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XB-70A on the taxiway on 21September 1964, the day of the first flight The XB-70s were intended to be used for the advanced study of aerodynamics, propulsion, and other subjects related to large supersonic transports. The crew was reduced to only the two pilots, as a navigator and a bombardier were not needed for this research role.Jenkins and Landis 2002, pp. 28, 73.
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The range of supersonic aircraft can be estimated with the Breguet range equation. The high per-passenger takeoff weight makes it difficult to obtain a good fuel fraction. This issue, along with the challenge presented by supersonic lift/drag ratios, greatly limits the range of supersonic transports. Because long distance routes were not a viable option, airlines had little interest in buying the jets.
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In April 1964 Braniff made deposits on two Boeing 2707 Supersonic Transports, $100,000 per aircraft. This would give Braniff slots number 38 and 44 when the SST began production. President Beard said the two aircraft would be used on the carrier's US to Latin America flights, where the Boeing 707 was performing satisfactorily. When this deposit was made, the SST program was being financed by the US government.
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One Kansas City Place is an example of the modern glass office buildings constructed in downtown Kansas City in the 1980s. These buildings define the Kansas City skyline today. Taken from street-view it is the tallest building in Missouri. Kansas City had a building boom in the 1970s based on TWA's plans to use the city as the world hub for its new fleet of Boeing 747s and anticipated supersonic transports.
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In April 1964 Braniff made deposits on two Boeing 2707 Supersonic Transports, $100,000 per aircraft. This would give Braniff slots number 38 and 44 when the SST began production. President Beard said the two aircraft would be used on the carrier's US to Latin America flights, where the Boeing 707 was performing satisfactorily. When this deposit was made, the SST program was being financed by the US government, under an edict from President Kennedy.
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The aerodynamic design of a supersonic aircraft needs to change with its speed for optimal performance. Thus, an SST would ideally change shape during flight to maintain optimal performance at both subsonic and supersonic speeds. Such a design would introduce complexity which increases maintenance needs, operations costs, and safety concerns. In practice all supersonic transports have used essentially the same shape for subsonic and supersonic flight, and a compromise in performance is chosen, often to the detriment of low speed flight.
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The "current year" in Dixie is 1985, with the world dominated by the U.S.A., the C.S.A., the moribund German Empire, the nascent Russian Republic, and the rapidly modernizing United Republic of India. Technology is somewhat more advanced than at the same date in our world, with personal hovercraft and supersonic transports commonplace, and the presence of nuclear-armed orbital weapons platforms and the juxtaposition of the progressive "Yankees" and the stratified "Southron" society adds to the tension caused by the "Long Drum Roll" (the U.S.A-C.S.A. analogue to the Cold War).
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Qualitative variation in Cd factor (drag coefficient) with Mach number (speed) for aircraft; supercruising above Mach2 is efficient. Only the supersonic transports (SST), Concorde and the last version of the Tu-144 (the Tu-144D), spent most of their time cruising at their design speeds without needing afterburning. Some combat aircraft that are listed as capable of supercruise may only be able to do so without an external weapons load, for example. Reheat was added to Concorde for take-off to cope with weight increases that came after the initial design.
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J58 experience was used extensively in the JTF17 engine proposal for a Mach 2.7 SST due to significant flight time at Mach 2.7 and above. It was also used for subsequent engines developed by Pratt & Whitney, both commercial and military. The next afterburning engine, the TF-30 as installed in the F-111, used an airframe-mounted secondary nozzle with free-floating flaps similar to that used on the SR-71. J58 emissions were measured as part of the NASA Stratospheric Wake Experiment which looked at the environmental impact of using afterburning jet engines for supersonic transports.
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In return, the "National Air Holdings Board" that was to assume control of the corporations was to be given a minority stake in the "Second Force" and at least one seat on its board.High Risk: The Politics of the Air, pp. 173–5, 195, 200–204 To enable the "Second Force" to become viable by 1980, its minimum size was to be at least 4 billion long-haul scheduled service seat miles (6.4 billion seat kilometres) per annum by 1975, and its fleet was to consist of at least 14 state-of-the-art long-haul aircraft, including three supersonic transports (SSTs), three wide-bodied trijets and eight conventional narrow-bodied jets.High Risk: The Politics of the Air, p.
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She enrolled in the engineering program the following fall as one of the few female students at the college and only female in the engineering department. She graduated in 1941 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering with an aeronautical option, the first woman to do so at the college and one of just five women in the country that year to earn a degree in engineering or architecture. Following graduation, she was the first female engineer hired by the Civil Aviation Administration. During her 32-year career, she specialized in aircraft safety developing standards for supersonic transports which were used to create the concorde and pioneering distribution of aircraft structural issues.
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At the Equator, under flat conditions (without obstructions like mountains or at a height above any such obstructions), the terminator moves at approximately 463 m/s. This speed can appear to increase when near obstructions, such as the height of a mountain, as the shadow of the obstruction will be cast over the ground in advance of the terminator along a flat landscape. The speed of the terminator decreases as it approaches the poles, where it can reach a speed of zero (full-day sunlight or darkness).Venus Revealed by David Harry Grinspoon, page 329 Supersonic aircraft like jet fighters or Concorde and Tupolev Tu-144 supersonic transports are the only aircraft able to overtake the maximum speed of the terminator at the equator.
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According to Train, this could lead to greater ground-level heat and hamper the formation of ozone. In relation to stratospheric water and its potential to increase ground temperatures, although not mentioning Concorde as the source of the "recent decline in water vapor is unknown", in 2010 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted that Stratospheric Water Vapor levels in the 1980s and 1990s were higher than that in the 2000s, by approximately 10%, with Susan Solomon of NOAA calculating that it is this change which is responsible for the slow down in the rise in surface temperatures from global warming by about 25 percent when compared to the warming rate in the 1990s. Russell Train's other, water-ozone concern, was however countered by Fred Singer in a letter to the journal Nature in 1971, "which upset those who claimed that supersonic transports might seriously affect stratospheric ozone".
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Current regulations prohibit supersonic flight over land areas in the United States; the X-54 is part of NASA's efforts to have the regulations altered to allow for supersonic transports to be commercially viable. NASA's X-54 project is intended to continue the research objectives of the DARPA Quiet Supersonic Aircraft, and is intended to demonstrate low-boom technologies and methods validated by projects such as the NASA Quietspike project, the Shaped Sonic Boom Demonstrator, FaINT Project, and WSPR Project. The X-54 will be designed from the ground up to incorporate all the technology and lessons learned from this combined NASA research spanning several decades into a viable aircraft capable of producing under 75 pdB on the ground while cruising over above . The X-54 aircraft will demonstrate low-noise supersonic flight for use in community base testing to provide research data to reform domestic and international regulations on supersonic over-land flight.
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