NASA moves a step closer to supersonic passenger flights
Oh for the glory days of travel, when the seats were bigger, the food was better, and you could jet across the Atlantic in less than three hours.
Since the 2003 end of Concorde, of course, flitting quickly across the Atlantic has been a thing of the past. Flights between London and New York take around eight hours, or closer to seven in the other direction. The record currently stands at just under five hours from New York to London, pushed on by a favorable jetstream.
The space agency has confirmed in a blog post about its “high-speed strategy” that it has recently studied whether commercial flights at up to Mach 4 – over 3,000 miles per hour – could take off in the future.
The study by NASA’s Glenn Research Center suggested that there are already “potential passenger markets… in about 50 established routes.” These routes were confined to transoceanic ones, including over the North Atlantic and the Pacific, because nations including the US ban overland supersonic flight.
However, NASA is developing “quiet” supersonic aircraft, called X-59, as part of its Quesst mission. The agency hopes that the new aircraft could eventually prompt modification of these rules, clearing the way for aircraft flying between Mach 2 and Mach 4 (1,535 – 3,045 miles per hour). Concorde’s maximum speed was Mach 2.04, or 1,354 miles per hour. A jet traveling at Mach 4 could potentially make a transatlantic crossing in as little as 90 minutes.
Oh for the glory days of travel, when the seats were bigger, the food was better, and you could jet across the Atlantic in less than three hours. Since the 2003 end of Concorde, of course, flitting quickly across the Atlantic has been a thing of the past. Flights between London and New York take…