NASA Begins Work on Quieter Supersonic Passenger Jet

The return of supersonic passenger travel is one step closer to reality with NASA's award of a contract for the preliminary design of a low boom flight demonstrator aircraft. This is the first in a series of X-planes in NASA's New Aviation Horizons initiative, introduced in the agency's Fiscal Year 2017 budget. NASA selected a team led by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company to complete a preliminary design for Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST). The work will be conducted under a task order against the Basic and Applied Aerospace Research and Technology (BAART) contract at NASA's Langley Research Center. After conducting feasibility studies and working to better understand acceptable sound levels across the country, NASA's Commercial Supersonic Technology Project asked industry teams to submit design concepts for a piloted test aircraft that can fly at supersonic speeds, creating a supersonic 'heartbeat' - a soft thump rather than the disruptive boom currently associated with supersonic flight.

Transcript

00:00:01 [MUSIC] Commercial supersonic flight has long been desired to reduce air travel time and improve personal mobility, particularly for today's long-distance travel. However, these benefits have not been realized due to the challenge of sonic boom. [SONIC BOOM] When the Concorde was designed in the 1960s, sonic boom was so disruptive to people on the ground that a prohibition was soon placed on supersonic

00:00:30 commercial flights over land that remains in effect today. This prohibition created an economic barrier that extinguished civil supersonic aviation. Sonic boom reduction has been pursued for many years, but recently NASA and its partners have made a number of significant advances that bring the goal much closer. New boom-reduction aircraft shaping tools have been developed and validated by analysis, wind tunnel testing and flight experiments. In addition, acoustic studies conducted in laboratories and in-flight tests using special maneuvers have indicated that the boom levels that

00:01:03 can now be achieved may produce little or no disturbance to communities. These advances have the potential to overturn the ban on supersonic over-land flight but must be proven outside of the laboratory and off the flight test range. NASA and its partners believe that the time is right to conduct a flight demonstration. To do this, a new X-plane incorporating boom reduction design will be developed and flown. For cost savings, this demonstrator will be smaller than future civil supersonic aircraft but will be designed to replicate their boom. Flying overhead, this innovative aircraft will produce a soft "thump" sound in place of the sonic boom. [THUMP SOUND]

00:01:42 The first phase of the flight research project will validate the low-boom design and to make an initial assessment of the acceptability of the noise levels. Through cooperation with regulatory agencies and community participation, NASA will use this X-plane for supersonic overflight research, assessing the community's response to the sonic thump... If they even notice. The research generated by this crucial program will create an opportunity to change the rules for supersonic flight, taking a giant leap to the next generation of civilian aircraft and accelerating us into the future, quietly unlocking the freedom to travel around the world beyond the speed of sound.

00:02:20 [MUSIC]