12/8/2023 0 Comments Boom aircraftAt Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound), the aircraft heat soaks around 100☌. Heat dissipation is a big problem for supersonic aircraft. To prevent this the aircraft contained very small passenger windows, which provided a survivable cabin environment with the complete failure of up to two of the cabin windows. Although the aircraft had stability augmentation to ease pilot workload, it was statically stable and could be hand flown with the augmentation system disabled.Ĭoncorde used fuel transfer to shift the aircraft center of gravity at supersonic speeds, thus reducing trim drag to near-zero.Ĭoncorde was certified to fly up to 60,000 feet, where a rapid decompression would instantly kill all on board. It also had a complete manual backup in case the new-technology system should fail. The aircraft was the first to certify a full authority fly-by-wire flight control system. This is a feat modern fighters can just barely pull off, and even that is for a brief duration. Concorde could supercruise without afterburners. They also were stable under all conditions through a combination of an active and passive control system, which prevented potentially deadly engine “unstarts”. These inlets slowed the incoming air to subsonic speeds with incredible efficiency. The engines were fed by two-dimensional, variable geometry inlets. To this day the Olympus 593 is the largest aerospace jet engine core ever built. The engines were afterburning turbojets with the reliability and longevity to be usable in airline service. Many new technologies were developed and certified on Concorde. It’s remarkable the project went anywhere given that most previous Anglo-French joint ventures had been wars. Being a joint venture between Britain and France, it was their flagship project during the (aero)space race of the 1960s. Concorde really was revolutionary, it was years ahead of its time. We will start this list with the first and only successful supersonic transport in history. Here they are, in rough chronological order with a recurring crazy idea at the end. I asked Joe to take us for a fast flight through 10 supersonic transport aircraft projects. I met Joe in a field full of tanks in the middle of the English countryside, within minutes we were talking about supersonic inlet designs, here was a man I wanted to hear more from. They have already unveiled a small scale demonstrator, the XB-1 ‘Baby Boom’ (left). Joe Wilding was the co-founder of Boom Supersonic, an independent company attempting to build a supersonic transport aircraft.
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