NASA appears to be pulling its SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest production plane ever made, out of retirement as the Trump administration teases its new line of hypersonic surveillance jets — but doubt…
Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
If they can get supersonic flight to be more fuel efficient, and avoid sonic booms (an active area of research for NASA’s X-59 project), and we develop manufacturing capacity for huge amounts of synthetic sustainable aviation fuel from CO2 and water and green energy, then maybe we’ll be at a place where supersonic commercial flights can be both economically feasible AND environmentally responsible. Probably not in my lifetime, but still something I expect to happen in the next century or so.
Yeah, the Concorde was interesting in that its design was optimized for cruising, so that taxiing, takeoff, and reaching cruise altitude/speed took a gargantuan amount of fuel compared to other aircraft and even to its own cruising efficiency.
I can see why someone could look at that and assume that they could do better with modern design principles, including the knowledge that planes need way more passenger seats to improve the per passenger efficiency.
Then again, the company that took the most concrete steps towards developing a supersonic engine pivoted to creating gas turbines for AI data centers (but was just dropped by its major customer on that, so who knows what they do next).
What’s interesting about supersonic flight is that there’s been some developments on making supersonic flight more fuel efficient.
The F-22’s big strategic advantage is that it can supercruise at Mach 1.5, without afterburners, and although the details are not publicly known, the publicly known facts suggest that it’s about 3x as fuel efficient as the other fighters in the US arsenal.
If they can get supersonic flight to be more fuel efficient, and avoid sonic booms (an active area of research for NASA’s X-59 project), and we develop manufacturing capacity for huge amounts of synthetic sustainable aviation fuel from CO2 and water and green energy, then maybe we’ll be at a place where supersonic commercial flights can be both economically feasible AND environmentally responsible. Probably not in my lifetime, but still something I expect to happen in the next century or so.
That’s a lot of ifs.
And for what it’s worth, the concorde had afterburner-free cruising. It needed them for takeoff only.
And keep in mind that fuel prices are much higher now than in the 90-00s.
Yeah, the Concorde was interesting in that its design was optimized for cruising, so that taxiing, takeoff, and reaching cruise altitude/speed took a gargantuan amount of fuel compared to other aircraft and even to its own cruising efficiency.
I can see why someone could look at that and assume that they could do better with modern design principles, including the knowledge that planes need way more passenger seats to improve the per passenger efficiency.
Then again, the company that took the most concrete steps towards developing a supersonic engine pivoted to creating gas turbines for AI data centers (but was just dropped by its major customer on that, so who knows what they do next).