APART from a gentle nudge in the back as the pilots opened the throttles of its four Rolls-Royce Olympus jet engines, passengers had little sensation that Concorde was accelerating through the sound barrier. Not so for those on the ground. A sonic boom trailing behind the aircraft would rattle windows and dislodge roof tiles in Devon and Cornwall, two western British counties under the aircraft’s flight path from London to New York, a journey it could complete in just over three hours.
Supersonic passenger flights came to an end in 2003 after a downturn in air travel and a fatal crash in Paris three years earlier. But Concorde, although a technological marvel for its time, was never a commercial success: the 14 aircraft that saw service were heavily subsidised by British and French taxpayers; they had limited range and guzzled fuel flying subsonically, which they were largely forced to do over land because of their sonic booms. Yet the idea of a Concorde successor has never quite gone away. If a supersonic airliner were to fly again, however, such a noisy footprint would have to be toned down.
Now a group of engineers at NASA,...Continue reading
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