Sonic Booms No More? (Was: Perfect electro-magnetic storm)

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 10:02:08 -0600, "Montblack"
wrote in Message-Id:
:

While the usual inanity contained in articles posted by Montblack are
easily dismissed, this caught my eye:

"Styled by the laws of nature.............Concorde"


It seems that the next generation of supersonic airliners may be
permitted to fly over the US (to the west coast where I reside):



http://www.discoverychannel.co.uk/ne...rticle01.shtml
The shape of jets to come

AS TICKETS for Concorde's final flight go on sale this week, an
American aerospace company has demonstrated a way to modify a
supersonic jet to dramatically reduce its sonic boom. The work
could pave the way for a new generation of business jets quiet
enough to fly at supersonic speed over populated areas.

Sonic booms are one of the biggest drawbacks of supersonic flight.
They are the sharp thunderclaps caused by shock waves created at
the nose and tail of an aircraft meeting as they travel to the
ground. Where the shock waves overlap they reinforce each other,
creating the boom. Concorde's boom is so loud that it is forbidden
from flying at supersonic speeds over land.

In the 1970s, Richard Seebass and Albert George at Cornell
University in New York came up with a straightforward way to
counter the problem. They reasoned that a shock wave would be
weaker if it were spread out over a larger area. This could be
achieved by replacing a plane's sharp nose with a blunter shape
and redesigning parts of the wings, for example where the base of
the wing meets the fuselage, so that the angles between surfaces
do not change so sharply. The idea was to allow the shock waves to
form over larger areas of the aircraft's surface. Years of
computer modelling and wind tunnel tests have validated the
concept, but it had never been tried in flight.

Now the American aerospace company Northrop Grumman ...



http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993616
...
New chapter

A supersonic successor will be very different in design, Jackson
told New Scientist: "There will be such an interval before any
supersonic transport gets going again, that we'll start on a
separate chapter of air travel."

Bill Gunston, editor of Jane's Aero Engines and author of the book
Faster Than Sound, believes dramatic improvements in aerodynamics
over the last 30 years would now make it possible to build a much
far more efficient supersonic craft than Concorde. He says the
airplane's lift-to-drag ratio means it requires very powerful
engines and huge amounts of fuel.

"Any capable design outfit could design something vastly superior
to Concorde," Junston told New Scientist.
...


http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030929/12/e9q0q.html
Monday September 29, 04:00 PM

Curvy aircraft could silence sonic booms
By David L. Chandler

As tickets for Concorde's final flight go on sale this week, an
American aerospace company has demonstrated a way to modify a
supersonic jet to dramatically reduce its sonic boom.

The work could pave the way for a new generation of business jets
quiet enough to fly at supersonic speed over populated areas.

Sonic booms are one of the biggest drawbacks of supersonic flight.
They are the thunderclaps caused when shock waves created at the
nose and tail of an aircraft meet as they travel to the ground.
Where the shock waves overlap they reinforce each other, creating
the boom. Concorde's boom is so loud that the plane is forbidden
from flying at supersonic speeds over land.

In the 1970s, Richard Seebass and Albert George at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York, came up with a straightforward way
to counter the problem. They reasoned that a shock wave would be
weaker if it were spread out over a larger area.

This could be achieved by replacing a plane's sharp nose with a
blunter shape and redesigning parts of the wings, for example
where the base of the wing meets the fuselage, so that the angles
between surfaces do not change so abruptly.

The idea was to force the shock waves to fan out more rapidly as
they move away from these curves, spreading out their energy.
Years of computer modelling and wind tunnel tests have validated
the concept, but it had never been tried in flight.

Now the American aerospace company Northrop Grumman has ...

A. You forgot the :-) .....g
See what I did there Larry,? I grinned the smiley.

B. I stole that sig line from somebody's post - Dave, in the Three Concordes
thread.

C. I'm going to have a beer - before noon, to celebrate being called inane
by LD. Inane Alert That pre-noon beer will sure take me back to my brewery
days. Ahhh, good times.

D. Dismissed!! Oh well. At least you didn't *plonk* me - did you? Larry?
Hello....

--
Montblack
"Just the usual inanity "


"Larry Dighera"
While the usual inanity contained in articles posted by Montblack are
easily dismissed, this caught my eye:

"Styled by the laws of nature.............Concorde"

Larry Dighera wrote:

It seems that the next generation of supersonic airliners may be
permitted to fly over the US (to the west coast where I reside):

They will if an American company operates the plane. According to most press
reports that I saw at the time Concorde was being developed, about the only
reason the ban on SST flight was passed through Congress was the fact that the
Concorde was European. This was an era in which laws such as safety regulations
were being heavily used in economic warfare by Congress.

George Patterson
You can dress a hog in a tuxedo, but he still wants to roll in the mud.

Larry Dighera writes:

It seems that the next generation of supersonic airliners may be
permitted to fly over the US (to the west coast where I reside):

The problem of sonic booms was always vastly exaggerated, anyway (just
like the problem of solar flares). I heard sonic booms all the time
when I was little, and it never bothered me. I could never figure out
what the big deal was.

--
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

In article ,
Larry Dighera wrote:
On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 10:02:08 -0600, "Montblack"
wrote in Message-Id:
:

While the usual inanity contained in articles posted by Montblack are
easily dismissed, this caught my eye:

"Styled by the laws of nature.............Concorde"


It seems that the next generation of supersonic airliners may be
permitted to fly over the US (to the west coast where I reside):

One of the design proposals in the 1950s for an alternative to what became
Concorde (the M1.8, later M2.0 SST) was a M1.2 to M1.5 aeroplane with a
wing shape designed to not produce sonic booms at ground level - Armstrong
Whitworth produced a design with an "M" shaped wing, and the oblique-wing
design from Handley-Page may have been intended for the same job. There's
a picture of a design mock-up of the A-W M-wing in this month's Aeroplane
Monthly. There's a plan-view of it at:
http://airlines.afriqonline.com/aircraft/paper/
The oblique-wing H-P is in there too.
There was also an M-wing proposal (M1.3) from Bristol, for the same
reasons as the A-W:
http://www.chew76.fsnet.co.uk/concorde/bris2.jpg

--
Andy Breen ~ Interplanetary Scintillation Research Group
http://users.aber.ac.uk/azb/
Feng Shui: an ancient oriental art for extracting
money from the gullible (Martin Sinclair)

On 30 Oct 2003 13:24:56 -0000, (ANDREW ROBERT BREEN)
wrote in Message-Id: :

One of the design proposals in the 1950s for an alternative to what became
Concorde (the M1.8, later M2.0 SST) was a M1.2 to M1.5 aeroplane with a
wing shape designed to not produce sonic booms at ground level - Armstrong
Whitworth produced a design with an "M" shaped wing, and the oblique-wing
design from Handley-Page may have been intended for the same job. There's
a picture of a design mock-up of the A-W M-wing in this month's Aeroplane
Monthly. There's a plan-view of it at:
http://airlines.afriqonline.com/aircraft/paper/

Thank you for the information and the link. It looks like something
out of a 1930s episode of Buck Rogers. The concept of the probe on
the nose to keep the supersonic shock wave clear of the wings probably
wouldn't stop it from causing ground level sonic booms.

The oblique-wing H-P is in there too.
There was also an M-wing proposal (M1.3) from Bristol, for the same
reasons as the A-W:
http://www.chew76.fsnet.co.uk/concorde/bris2.jpg

Wow! That design is even more bizarre. However, it doesn't seem to
be designed to reduce sonic booms either. The concept of placing the
passengers in the wing is consistent with Boeing's latest proposed
creation.