Is Supersonic Just A Loser?

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Rapid transportation-that is, anything faster than a galloping horse-hasn’t been with us all that long. Steam locomotives weren’t in widespread use until well into the 19th century, cars came along 70 years later and the airplane a full century after the locomotive.

But the timeline for speed evolution in airplanes was almost too rapid to be believed, spurred on by two wars and surging advancements in materials and manufacturing. Within just 45 years of the Wright’s demonstration of powered flight at 40 mph, Mach 1 had been exceeded and within a few years of that, it had been exceeded several fold in military and test aircraft. It took a little longer for transport aircraft to catch up, but catch up they did. And then speed advancements came to a decisive halt for more than 40 years and counting.

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As the chart here shows, a little over 20 years after the Wrights, the Ford Tri-Motor doubled cruise speed carrying a lot more people. Speed doubled again with the introduction of the Douglas DC-3 and by the golden age of piston airliners after World War II, it fell just shy of doubling again. The introduction of the DH 106 Comet pushed speeds up again, by nearly 50 percent, cracking the 500 mph mark. The fastest contemporary transport aircraft have pushed that up to 570 mph (0.85 Mach), but these speeds haven’t materially changed in 45 years, although fuel efficiency certainly has.

The obvious spike, albeit it a short-lived one, was the supersonic Aerospatiale-BAC Concorde. At Mach 2.05 or 1320 mph, it did what no other airliner had: doubled cruising speed by a wide margin. It also proved unsustainable. Even though the nine airframes still flying in 2003 when the airplane was retired were said to be profitable or at least break even, supersonic airline service evidently was a victim of a general downturn and predicted high maintenance costs for airplanes that had essentially been designed in the 1960s and weren’t candidates for upgrades. The manufacturer declined to support them after 2003.

Looking at the timeline chart, supersonic passenger flight seems like such an outlier, you have to wonder if Mach 0.85 is as fast as we’re ever going to go in airliners?Is that all there is? It’s a ridiculous assumption, of course. Inevitably, speed will resume its upward climb, just as it always has. It’s merely a question of economics and technology merging at the right point, as they did for Concorde. Until they didn’t.

As we’ve reported, one company, Aerion, is well along with plans for a supersonic business jet and promises to have deliveries by 2020. Nice plan, but that’s just five years off and the blink of an eye in aerospace certification time. Similarly, Gulfstream has an SBJ project on the table, although nothing specific has been announced. The company has recently been awarded patents related to supersonic technology designed to reduce sonic boom effects.

This is not new ground for Gulfstream. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it partnered with the Sukhoi Design Bureau in Moscow to jointly develop an SBJ designated the S-21. But delays and a sharply limited market for such an airplane killed the project. Sukhoi has been seeking other partners to continue the project.

Students of aviation history will recall that Boeing reached the same point with its 2707 SST in 1971, after it worked through a design competition with North American and Lockheed. Interestingly, what became the Boeing SST actually owed its roots to the Kennedy administration, which was pushing aerospace initiatives, in addition to space exploration. The government even provided seed money, but that was cut off in 1971. Prior to that, then-FAA Administrator Najeeb Halaby said that a U.S. failure to enter the SST market would be a “stunning setback.” The FAA predicted that as many as 500 SSTs could be sold by 1990, a figure that, in retrospect, seems delusional. (A total of 14 Concordes were placed in service.)

If it had made it into service, the 2707 would have been a sight to behold. According to Boeing’s specs, it could carry 200 to 300 passengers-three times Concorde’s capacity-and would cruise up to Mach 3. That’s New York to London in two hours and change or, ignoring the broken windows, Los Angeles to New York in 90 minutes, at 60,000 feet. It would have been a hell of a ride.

But will we ever see it? Certainly, the technology exists to achieve such an airplane and probably to certify it, too, for any company with deep enough pockets and large enough cojones to attempt it. The risk is the limited size of the market for such a thing. Toward the end, a Concorde transatlantic round trip cost between $10,000 and $12,000 in 2003 dollars or up to $15,000 today. Presumably, a second-gen SST would be more efficient, but probably not nearly enough to reduce tickets to hoi-polloi pricing. As British Airways and Air France discovered, there is enough wealth in the world to support such prices, but maybe not so much to support a large fleet of SSTs. In any case, the airlines weren’t pricing just to support the service, but at what they thought the passengers considered it worth. (A lot.) Before an SST is the next big thing–or just a thing–autonomous and automated flight will be, with freight first and passengers later.

The airline market has strongly driven not towards more speed, but economy and efficiency. Engines and airframes, operating at about the same speeds they did in 1970, are a third more efficient now than then. Here’s an interesting fact. When I got out of the service in 1971, I flew to Europe a couple of times on what Pan Am then called youth fares: $199 round trip New York to Rome, Paris or Munich on a 747. In 2014 dollars, that’s about $1168, a little less than you might pay today, depending on the season. Those were discounted about 25 percent, so a full fare was $250, again less than you might pay today, in 2014 dollars.That was pre-deregulation, by the way.

The rules are obviously different for business flyers who use private aircraft. Some CEOs will spend as much on airplanes as their boards and stockholders will tolerate. Maybe enough of them can support the argument that they need to be there two hours sooner to close some important deal to constitute a market for SBJs. Even so, I wouldn’t expect to see many of them. At some point, someone will point out that electrons move a lot faster than airplanes ever will.

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