Collaborate Disseminate
Although spying is a time-honored tradition, the sheer scope of it reached a fever pitch during the Cold War, when everyone was spying on everyone, and conceivably for both sides …read more Continue reading Cold War Spying And The Questionable Use Of Smuggled Blueprints In Developing Supersonic Airliners
Every nation has icons of national pride: a sports star, a space mission, or a piece of architecture. Usually they encapsulate a country’s spirit, so citizens can look up from their dreary lives and say “Now there‘s something I …read more
Continue reading The Politics of Supersonic Flight: the Concord(e)
Since the last Concorde rolled to a stop in 2003, supersonic flight has been limited almost exclusively to military aircraft. Many have argued that it’s an example of our civilization seeming to slip backwards on the technological scale, akin to returning to the Age of Sail. There’s no debating that …read more
Continue reading Boom Hopes to Reignite Supersonic Travel with XB-1
If you are a certain age, you probably remember the promise of supersonic transports. The Concorde took less than 4 hours to go across the Atlantic, but it stopped flying in 2003 and ended commercial supersonic passenger flights But back in the 1970s, we thought the Concorde would give way …read more
Continue reading Air-Breathing Rocket Engine Promises Future Space Planes
The history of aviation is full of notable X-Planes, a number of which heralded in new generations of flight. The Bell X-1 became the first aircraft to break the speed of sound during level flight in 1947 with the legendary Charles “Chuck” Yeager at the controls. A few years later the X-2 would push man up to Mach 3, refining our understanding of supersonic flight. In the 1960’s, the North American built X-15 would not only take us to the edge of space, but set a world speed record which remains unbroken.
Compared to the heady post-war days when it …read more
Continue reading Shushing Sonic Booms: NASA’s Supersonic X-Plane to Take Flight in 2021
On October 24th, 2003 the last Concorde touched down at Filton Airport in England, and since then commercial air travel has been stuck moving slower than the speed of sound. There were a number of reasons for retiring the Concorde, from the rising cost of fuel to bad publicity following a crash in 2000 which claimed the lives of all passengers and crew aboard. Flying on Concorde was also exceptionally expensive and only practical on certain routes, as concerns about sonic booms over land meant it had to remain subsonic unless it was flying over the ocean.
The failure of …read more
Continue reading GE’s Engine to Reignite Civil Supersonic Flight