Is there a future for supersonic travel?

I’m too young and not French/British so I don’t really remember Concorde.  Apparently Concorde was doomed for several reasons including noise, fuel cost, and the crash.

Going from London or Paris to NYC in just a few short hours became a thing of the past since regardless of the crash, we still couldn’t get over noise or fuel cost.

A new class of engineers has emerged and by 2025 supersonic passenger travel may again be a reality.  Let’s face it, we should be moving to faster flights, not maintaining the status quo of around 500 mph.  The new aircraft called the Sonic Star claims it will go twice as fast as Concorde at Mach 3.1.

The 20-seat Sonic Star is intended to have a hybrid engine, in which turbines create electricity, which is used to turn the fans and compressors. “Our way of doing it is more efficient and creates less waste because we don’t need to turn a driveshaft,” Mr Lugg said.

The Sonic Star would also use electromagnetic currents across the fuselage to suppress the sonic boom and thereby overcome the regulatory and noise hurdle faced by supersonic travel.

Invalid request error occurred.

I probably won’t be able to afford such a flight unless frequent flyer redemptions are possible, but I would still hope this plane will indeed take flight.

2 Comments

  1. Concorde travelled at slightly faster than Mach 2. Mach 3.1 would be about 50% faster, not twice as fast.

    Either way, it would be great to see something developed to replace speedbird…

    1. That was what the article said and I was just summarizing the article. According to Wikipedia Concorde did travel around Mach 2.04 so the authors of the article had it wrong.

Comments are closed.