A newly dismissed image shows the Barrier of Sound being broken On February 10, when the first Civil Civil Jet in the United States completed its second flight at speeds higher than Mach 1.
NASA Terra teams used Schlieren’s photograph to capture shock waves around the XB-1 XB-1 demo aircraft while it was moving through the air.
“This image makes the invisible visible,” said Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, in a press release.
To capture Schlieren’s images, Boom’s chief pilot Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg, positioned XB-1 at an exact moment and in a precise place about the Mojave Desert.
While the aircraft was flying in front of the sun, the NASA team documented changes in air speed as speeds above Mach 1, the sound speed (761.23 miles per hour or 1,225.1 kilometers per hour).
The images were captured by terrestrial telescopes with special filters that detect air distortions.
NASA teams also collected data on the volume of sound produced by XB-1 on the flight route.
The boom says that its analysis found that no audible manage reached the ground during the flight.
Minimizing the Sonic crash has been a key goal of the engineers involved in the race to bring back the commercial supersonic air trips.
The throbbing sounds created by Sonic crashes caused international governments to prohibit them from occurring in densely populated areas or restricted them only over the sea.
Not having an audible Sonic crash, says Scholl, “paves the way for coast to coastlines up to 50% faster.”
On January 28 this year, the XB-1 made its first supersonic flight.
The aircraft is the forerunner of the development of Boom’s supersonic commercial aircraft, Overture.
The long-awaited plane already has 130 requests and pre-orders from American Airlines, United Airlines and Japan Airlines.
It has been almost 55 years since Concorde Prototype 002 has first flew Mach 1 on March 25, 1970, and more than 21 years since supersonic commercial trips ended with the final flight of the Anglo-Frank plane in November 2003.
There have been several competitors in the supersonic space, while the remaining agreement accumulate dust in museums in the United Kingdom, USA and France, but so far no one has succeeded.
Boom Supersonic ambitions remain high. CEO Blake Scholl told CNN last year that he expects supersonic planes to replace conventional commercial planes in our lives.
“I really believe in the return of supersonic air travel and finally bringing it to all passengers on all routes. And this is not something that happens overnight, ”he said in March 2024.
The boom plan is that Overture is in operation before the end of the decade, transporting 64 to 80 passengers to Mach 1.7, about twice the speed of current subsonic aircraft.
When CNN Travel spoke to Scholl in May 2021, he told us that his dream was for people to one day “fly anywhere in the world in four hours for US $ 100 “. In 2024, he confirmed that this was still his “guide star.”
The company’s plan is that Overture operates a day on over 600 routes worldwide.
“A faster plane is much more efficient in human terms and much more efficient in terms of capital. You can make more flights with the same plane and crew, ”said Scholl.
“We can significantly reduce all costs and impacts involved in airplanes, making them faster. If we have faster planes, we won’t need so many. ”
The XB-1 test ship was used to prove new technologies developed by BoomSonic.
Just like Concorde, XB-1 and Overture have a long nose and a high angle of attack and landing attack, which interrupts the track riders’ view.
While Concorde dealt with this with a mobile fallen nose, Boom’s augmented reality vision system allows excellent track visibility for pilots without that weight and extra complexity.
“The advent of Digital Engineering is a great facilitator for the return of the supersonic flight,” Scholl told CNN in 2024. “Aerodynamics, materials, propulsion: these are the three major areas where we made a huge progress over Concorde.”
In the 1960s, Concorde was developed in wind tunnels, which meant building expensive physical models, performing tests, and then repeating them.
“You just can’t test many designs when each iteration costs millions and takes months,” explains Scholl. But the boom perfected the efficient aerodynamic design of its aircraft using computational fluid dynamics, which “is basically a digital wind tunnel. We can perform the equivalent of hundreds of wind tunnel tests at night in simulation by a fraction of the cost of a real wind tunnel test. ”
The XB-1 is made almost entirely of carbon fiber compounds, selected for being strong and light.
Overture is designed to be moved by conventional jet engines and operates with up to 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
We already talked about Here at CNN Travel, and Scholl told CNN last year he was aware of current problems.
“There is not enough, and it costs a lot, but it’s climbing,” he said, but he estimated that one day he will be used for all long -range air trips. It is the “future of aviation,” he declared.
The construction was completed last year at Boom’s Overture Superfactory in Greensboro, North Carolina. It is designed to climb and produce 66 Overture aircraft per year.
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