It’s not the things of which we know we’re ignorant that we should worry about, butit’s the things we’re unaware of not knowing that can really cause trouble so I felt as my emotions went wild in excitement, and mydwindling faith in Nigeria got an instantly boost because I now believe more than ever before that the Nigerian project is realizable even in my life time.
Listen to what a 5th grade, 10year old Amarachi told me during her recent school quiz completion.”I hate long flights because I get bored after a few hours she said! I will one day design a solution to ease the challenge of Sonic Boom problem so we can have supersonic flights as regular and normal like we have the subsonic flights. I know I can”. What a genius!
Since the last flight of the Concorde, a turbo-jet powered supersonic passenger plane, in 2003, jet travel has been stubbornly stuck at the same subsonic speed. As the troubled history of the Concorde (and its lesser Soviet counterpart, the Tupolev Tu-144) showed, supersonic air travel depends on overcoming a lot of obstacles, from the pesky sonic boom to high cost, safety issues and insatiable fuel consumption.
In all of these,Amarachi’s dream of jetting from Lagos to London in under three hours is real, attainable and not yet abandoned.Among travelers, especially the wealthy, there’s still demand for shorter flight times, especially since air travel has become so unpleasant in recent years.
There’s no great secret to supersonic flight: It’s about adding power until the aircraft can break the sound barrier.Trickier than the fuel dilemma is the problem posed by the sonic boom. When an aircraft travels faster than the speed of sound (768 mph), it pushes air molecules aside with enough force to create a shock wave, resulting in a thunder-like boom.
Even when it is generated thousands of feet above the ground, that boom is so loud that countries like the US and many others banned supersonic flight over its territory which drastically limited the routes the Concorde could fly, hurting its economic potential.To bring back supersonic flight, aircraft designers have to find a way to eliminate the boom problem, or quiet it enough to allow an acceptable decibel.
One proposal by Lockheed Martinincludes the installation of an inverted-V on the airplane’s tail, which the corporation believes could limit the level of sonic booms. The other alternative or another way to eliminate the boom is to leave the atmosphere altogether. Some aerospace expertsbelieve the future of high speed travel is in outer space.
“Rockets are the way to go,” Infact the idea of point-to-point space travel; a suborbital commercial spacecraft that will take off and land like a conventional plane cruising at Mach 3.5 (2,688 mph) is at the advanced stage. It will be “much more like a fighter pilot experience” than business class, says the designer, but it will make for an incredibly quick trip: say New York to Tokyo in 90 minutes.
The concord was considered a marvel of aviation technology,represented the pinnacle of business travel the ultimate status symbol for the jet- set executive.By the time the Concorde shut down in 2003, tickets from New York to Europe cost just under $10,000 a seat, a preserve of the wealthy. This distinctive droop-nosed aircraft that traveled twice the speed of sound, flying from London to New York in about three and a half hours — half the time of commercial airliners.
But even before the closure of the concord program, the luster was beginning to wane due to high operating costs and low passenger numbers, before Air France and British Airways grounded their small, aging fleet three years later.But the dream of supersonic flight has not disappeared knowing that aviation manufacturers such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Aerion are working on supersonic technology — with the latter predicting it could have a supersonic business jet in service as early as 2020.
Those barriers include high atmosphere emissions, noise produced when taking off and landing, and the sonic boom — the sound associated with the shockwaves created when objects travel faster than the speed of sound, which has prevented supersonic aircraft from flying overland routes and without overland supersonic flight, there’s never going to be a market for the supersonic aircraft.
Boeing is proposing a two-jet configuration with engines mounted above the wing, and Lockheed Martin’s tri-jet configuration, with two engines below the wing and a third mounted in the tail — had been proven to significantly reduce the sonic boom to a “thump,” dropping the noise from Concorde levels to close to what is considered the level of acceptability, and possibly the next-generation “son of Concorde” in the marketplace by around 2030, and supersonic business jet “could happen sooner.”
The boom is the barrier and if we can get past that, I think we’ll see people giving supersonic flight a lot more serious consideration.” Once the technology is established, airlines will likely compete to offer it to more and more customers, for lower and lower prices. International business will get easier, friends and families separated by oceans will see each other more often, and the world will get a little smaller.”
Are there going to be enough passengers willing to pay higher fares to fly more quickly?” Yes. “If you look at Concorde, that wasn’t the case. It came along at a time when the 747 also came in, which carried more people for lower fares. That’s where the market was. “I’m sure that when the original plans for Concorde, the A380 and the 787 Dreamliner were announced, the same questions about whether it could be achieved were asked. But they eventually delivered. I think time will tell.”