NASA prepares supersonic passenger plane - as the Concorde, only better

The US space agency announced it is developing in partnership with GE and Lockheed Martin, a supersonic passenger plane - which the skies of the world not seen since the retirement of the Concorde in 2003. The Concorde, which was created by France and England in the 1970s, has always had a critical problem to exceed the speed of sound, generated the so-called sonic boom, a shock wave heard as a kind of explosion by people on the ground. Therefore, the Concorde was forbidden to fly at supersonic speeds when it was over populated areas, which limited its agility enough. The plane stopped commercial operation in early 2000, when it carried out a serious crash that killed 113 people in Paris. Since then, the commercial aviation ceased to offer supersonic flights.

But in relying on NASA, it will come back. The agency says it has invented a silent supersonic technology, which greatly reduces the sonic boom - and intends to use it on a new plane, called QueSST Passenger Jet (the acronym stands for Quiet Supersonic Technology), whose tests already start in 2020. No for more information about the aircraft, such as price or number of passengers, but NASA released an animation showing how it can be (see below). NASA says only that the noise reduction is achieved thanks to the plane shape, which is quite different from the ordinary, and the materials used in its construction.

Besides the NASA project, there are other supersonic aviation initiatives - to meet executive flights market. The plane AS2, the Aerion Corporation, is one of them. It promises up to 12 passengers and a maximum speed of Mach 1.5 (one and a half times the speed of sound). But the S-512, Spike Aerospace, promises to take 18 passengers at Mach 1.6. Both will be tested between 2018 and 2020.