I feel the need...the need for speed

mooneyguy

mooneyguy

been around forever
I saw an article about the Aerion super sonic business get. So far they have 50 letter of intent to buy. So it's a cool looking plane and being able to depart From Paris at 8am and make it to New York for breakfast sounds really cool. However from the pilot view I wonder how many would want to fly this type of plane as a career. Ok its cool looking , its fast, but you would spend most of your career at FL510 watching the globe spin by under you. I think I would be happier staying lower and making more stops. http://www.aerioncorp.com/video

What would you do?
 

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mooneyguy said:
I saw an article about the Aerion super sonic business get. So far they have 50 letter of intent to buy. So it's a cool looking plane and being able to depart From Paris at 8am and make it to New York for breakfast sounds really cool. However from the pilot view I wonder how many would want to fly this type of plane as a career. Ok its cool looking , its fast, but you would spend most of your career at FL510 watching the globe spin by under you. I think I would be happier staying lower and making more stops.

What would you do?
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One of my ultimate career goals in the future is to fly a super sonic aircraft. It would be the icing on the cake for me. Clearly that goal is well down the road as there are many obstacles, technical and otherwise to overcome for supersonic aircraft in the civilian world.

We'll see ;).
 
I dont know that you will see a super sonic busniess jet come out. Its not that it can't be done. The main reason they stopped flying the concord wasn't safety problems, they releized while it wasn't flying during the crash investigation that they made more money using sub sonic airplanes. But in the busniess world I just can't see the use for them. Other than bragging rights.
 
The biggest hurdle that I see, looking forward, for the idea of a SST bizjet, is that that something of this nature is marketed exactly to the crowd of "well, we don't need this thing, but it's cool, and we can afford it, so why not." This is the same crowd that charters a G-V from NY to DC with 4 people. I think that in the "new economy," post our latest recession/ depression, that this type of spending will not reach the levels it was under the "old economy."

Furthermore, on a practical note, the Concorde catered to a niche need that more or less dried up. Combine that with the marketability of the price to offer the solution, BA and Air France simply found it was more profitable to park the Concorde than worry about keeping them airworthy.

The engineering and technology is certainly in place to make this happen, I just question if it would ever be a viable business model.
 
The Concorde was a faster, more capable ship...that was designed in the late '60s. It's 2009, we're flying around with technology that hasn't changed a whole in capability since the late 1950s. Concorde ended up being a doomed offshoot on the evolutionary tree of flight technology.
Looking at the same time period from 1900-1969, technology progressed from a few people here and there fiddling with pretty much useless lighter than air craft and rickety wood and glue contraptions to people landing on the moon. It seems like the progress of aerospace technology has really slowed down.
 
I don't really see an aircraft like this being all that successful due to the high operating costs. As far as flying this type of aircraft or flying a more conventional subsonic aircraft, it wouldn't make a huge difference to me personally. Tell me which one has the better pay and better QOL, and that will be the one that I choose.
 
Looks like they threw a streamlined fuselage onto a set of Citation wings. Nice looking jet but you can't just streamline the nosecone of a highly subsonic design and expect it to break the number. I'd also be interested to see what kind of transonic nightmares they would experience with that tailplane/vertical/horizontal stab configuration
 
///AMG said:
Looks like they threw a streamlined fuselage onto a set of Citation wings. Nice looking jet but you can't just streamline the nosecone of a highly subsonic design and expect it to break the number. I'd also be interested to see what kind of transonic nightmares they would experience with that tailplane/vertical/horizontal stab configuration
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Not getting into the aerodynamics side, but if you look at About Aerion, the founders have been involved in a bunch of DARPA work dealing with supersonic studies. These old buys might actually have a clue!
 
Business execs value time way more than your average airline passenger; I'd guess the future of supersonic travel -if there is any- is with biz jets.
 
scramjet said:
The Concorde was a faster, more capable ship...that was designed in the late '60s. It's 2009, we're flying around with technology that hasn't changed a whole in capability since the late 1950s. Concorde ended up being a doomed offshoot on the evolutionary tree of flight technology.
Looking at the same time period from 1900-1969, technology progressed from a few people here and there fiddling with pretty much useless lighter than air craft and rickety wood and glue contraptions to people landing on the moon. It seems like the progress of aerospace technology has really slowed down.
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Agreed. I wonder when we'll start moving away from the tube on a wing type design.
 
E_Dawg said:
Business execs value time way more than your average airline passenger; I'd guess the future of supersonic travel -if there is any- is with biz jets.
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No doubt. However, while THEIR numbers may put the hourly operating costs as being lower than a GLEX, I'd like to see those proven in the real world, if this thing ever gets built. I could certainly see it going the way of the Eclipse.

Keep in mind, that the majority of Concorde passengers were business types, not the usual airline crowd. Part of the decline of the Concorde's demand was the fact that a lot those trips came to be unnecessary, as more and more things were accomplished without face to face meetings.
 
wonder if this would make international organ donation possible? I'm glad that someone is trying this technology because as mentioned above, airplane design and capability hasen't changed very much at all. But if you look at the 40's and 50's, it was amazing what happened in the industry, now granted, military dollars fueled most of it but once something unique becomes popular, it will trickle down to be common, imagine if the concord could be made today to be faster, safer, cheaper, and every airliner was a concord.
 
scramjet said:
It's 2009, we're flying around with technology that hasn't changed a whole in capability since the late 1950s.
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Other than the fact that they're phenomenally more efficient and quiet now.

Depends on your definition of "capability". Being able to fly a lot further on the same amount of fuel sure seems like a significant change in capability.
 
Hacker15e said:
Other than the fact that they're phenomenally more efficient and quiet now.

Depends on your definition of "capability". Being able to fly a lot further on the same amount of fuel sure seems like a significant change in capability.
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I was thinking the same thing. To add a few more: significant advances in navigation, automation and reliability. There is a reason why most airliners in the 1960's had three or more engines. Think 'ETOPS'.;)
 
Hacker15e said:
Other than the fact that they're phenomenally more efficient and quiet now.

Depends on your definition of "capability". Being able to fly a lot further on the same amount of fuel sure seems like a significant change in capability.
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Capt.Caucasian said:
I was thinking the same thing. To add a few more: significant advances in navigation, automation and reliability. There is a reason why most airliners in the 1960's had three or more engines. Think 'ETOPS'.
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Yeah, those are advancements, but that's nothing compared to the enormous advancement that took place in aerospace technology in the first half of the 20th century. I'm no engineer, but it seems like aerospace has moved into a "legacy/it works" frame of mind instead of being the engine of progress that it once was. It reminds me of the railroads in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Granted like someone above said, there was major impetus behind the early leaps of technology, namely WWII and the Cold War, but still it's almost a sign of a decaying industrial base.
 
Capt. Caucasian said:
I was thinking the same thing. To add a few more: significant advances in navigation, automation and reliability. There is a reason why most airliners in the 1960's had three or more engines. Think 'ETOPS'.;)
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Pssht, that's nothing compared to the difference between a rickety wooden craft and a sleek, streamlined ship sailing through the sky a twice the speed of sound. ;)
 
I listened to a talk given by their principal scientist - smart, nice guy. They've taken an interesting approach with their aerodynamics. Instead of focusing on minimizing wave drag like most supersonic designs, they've used some of the features of supersonic flow to minimize skin friction drag instead through laminar flow.

At the time they were lacking manufacturing expertise. They had their preliminary design in hand but needed a partner whose business was the actual building of things.

I think there is a distinction between the time period from the beginning of flight to ~1969 and ~1969 onward. In the first half capabilities were rapidly expanding in the sense of continually doing NEW things. In the second half we've mostly been doing the same thing, but doing it better and better. Both are sides of progress. The first is much more exciting.
 
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