In this era of emerging technologies, the interest in bringing commercial supersonic flights back on board is also growing considerably. As we know, the first sonic boom made its sizzling debut around seventy-five years ago over the deserts of California. This was considered a milestone in the history of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and was made possible by the “Bell X-1 rocket plane” that has been designed to fly faster than the speed of sound. As per NACA (now NASA), the plane broke the sound barrier for the first time in October 14, 1947, and achieved a historical milestone because many were of the opinion that it was impossible to break the sound barrier, but it did.
However, a lot more projects like this came forward after this, including the X-1 “Glamorous Glennis” and then “Concorde” that served from 1976 to 2003. But all of these become grounded for major safety reasons and are a primary cause of excessive noise generation. Hence, they were banned by the authorities shortly. But not to worry, as NASA has revealed that it is going to come again with another sound-breaking plane in collaboration with aeronautical innovators as part of its Quesst mission. However, this time, things are much different than before in terms of safety considerations.
It should be noted that under the “Low Boom Flight Demonstrator project”, a team of engineers at NASA is designing and integrating the state-of-the-art “X-59 experimental airplane”, which will enable us one day to travel faster than the speed of sound, similar to what X-1 pilots did at that time. Hence, we are much closer to being supersonic as Catherine Bahm, who is an aeronautical engineer at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, said, “That first supersonic flight was such a tremendous achievement, and now you look at how far we’ve come since then. What we’re doing now is the culmination of so much of their work. “
Extensive research work over many years has enabled engineers to come to the conclusion that they can actually lower the loud sonic booms by modifying the shapes of these planes rather than working on the intensity of an aircraft. Considering this, they became successful in achieving “quieter sonic booms” when they altered the fuselage of a Northrop F-5E in the flight testing program by NASA’s Shaped Sonic Boom Demonstration project during 2003-04.
Hence, one of the most intriguing things about this project is that the X-59 is independent of generating loud sonic booms, which became the cause of Concorde’s ban in 2003. However, Peter Coen, who is NASA’s mission integration manager for Quesst, stated, “We’ve kind of been stuck with our airliners at about Mach.8 for the past almost 50 years, so being able to get there – wherever there is – much faster is still kind of an unfulfilled dream. With the X-59 flying on the Quesst mission, I think we’re ready to break the sound barrier once again. “
To that end, engineers are optimistic about this upcoming project, and it has been projected by NASA that X-59 will make its sizzling debut for the first flight in early 2023. This is exciting. Isn’t it?
