TechStuff Flies on the Concorde

even on international flights, which is amazing. But I've never ever flown on one of the most prestigious aircraft to have graced the skies. I never had the chance to do it on the Concorde. The Concorde took its first flight way back in nineteen sixty nine. It was a test flight. It would be several more years before it would go into passenger service. It would even be a

few years before we make its first transatlantic flight. But if we take the date of its first flight as the Concord's birthday, which I would argue is a pretty arbitrary thing, but go with me. The famous aircraft celebrated turning fifty on March second, two thousand nineteen. Because March second nineteen sixty nine is when it first took flight, But then the aircraft has also been out of service

for more than a decade. So in this episode, we're going to learn about the Concorde aircraft, what made it special, how it worked, and why they aren't zipping all over the place today. Now you all know I am physically incapable of doing an episode without a history lesson being involved, and this episode is no different. So to understand the story around the Concorde, we actually have to go back two decades before the Concorde ever took to the skies,

to a very special day. That day would be October nineteen. That's when Captain Charles E. Chuck Yeager took controls of an experimental aircraft, the Bell X one, a B twenty nine bomber carried the X one up to twenty thousand feet of altitude before releasing the jet from the bombay doors, and that is when Yeager made history. Now, Yeager he wasn't in tip top shape because he had been in a horseback riding accident and he neglected to tell anyone about it because he didn't want to get taken off

the test flight. He probably suffered a tiny bit of discomfort during this flight because two of his ribs were broken. So imagine not only being the first pilot to try and control a rocket powered aircraft capable of going at unprecedented speeds, but also doing so with your torso screaming at you in pain. The X one's engine was a

Reaction Motors x l R eleven rocket engine. Before long, Yeager was passing mock zero point eight five that represented the fastest speeds that engineers could simulate in wind tunnels. At that time. It was the literal truth that no one was really sure what might happen next. Mock speed, by the way, refers to the ratio of the speed of a body like a jet, to the speed of sound in the undisturbed medium through which the body is traveling.

So if a body a jet is going at the same speed that sound travels through that medium, this being the air, you would say it was traveling at mock one, it's traveling at the same speed as the speed of sound through that medium. Any number greater than one indicates that the body the jet is traveling faster than sound through that particular medium. So Yeager pushed the X one past Mock one, reaching Mock one point zero six at

forty three thousand feet of altitude. As his top speed and interesting stuff was starting to happen, shock waves formed over the top surface of his wings and just ahead of the nose of the jet. The shock wave is an important component of this story because it relates to sonic booms, something the Concorde would have to deal with decades later, and it means we have to talk a

bit more about sound. So sound propagates through the air as changes in air pressure, fluctuations in air pressure rapid fluctuations. As the Mock one description tells us, sound travels at a fixed speed depending upon the medium it's traveling through. So sound travels at different speeds through different types of media. Sound traveling through water will move at a different rate than sound traveling through air, but within a single medium

under similar conditions, it will always travel at a fixed speed. Now, this means a body moving through a medium can actually catch up to the sound waves it is producing as it moves. So let's say you are running down the road at an incredible speed and you're singing a song at the top of your lungs, and let's say for the purposes of this example, the song is bird House in your Soul, by they might be giants. The faster you run, the more you catch up to the sound

waves of your singing. And if you run fast enough, like at around seven hundred seventy miles per hour at sea level under normal atmospheric conditions, you are moving at the same speed as those sound waves. They're just building up right in front of you, and you're keeping speed with them. A person ahead of you wouldn't hear you singing until you were right next to them, and then the sound waves would hit them. Even if they saw you running toward them from really far away, they wouldn't

hear you till you were right there. The sound can't travel faster than seven seventy miles per hour. So there you are, You're Berry Allen, and you're singing your heart out while you're running as fast as you can. But then you realize, oh, I think I could actually run a little faster. Heck with it, I'm I'm gonna really turn up the speed, So you pour it on, you

crank it up beyond mock one. Now you're actually out running the sound waves that you are making the song you're singing is literally trailing behind you, and as you break through those sound waves, you're actually breaking the sound barrier itself. You're breaking through a pressure wall of air pressure. And since sound through the air is all about air pressure, a really interesting thing happens. There's a pressure collapse, Air rushes in to fill a sudden low pressure, and there

is a sonic boom. It's essentially the sound of an explosion allowed cracking noise. So you're running and you're singing, you are the flash. People standing on the road up ahead of you can see you there, see that you're zooming towards them at an incredible speed, but they don't hear you, and they don't even hear you when you're right next to them. If you could take a snapshot of the instant you run right next to these people,

they wouldn't have heard anything yet. It's only after you have passed, when the sound waves you've emitted catch up and that pressure disturbance wave hits the bystanders that they experience the boom. And at that distance it is probably a really bad thing to experience. It would probably mess up your internal organs. To be honest, it's not that pleasant when a supersonic aircraft passes thousands of feet overhead, If it's low enough, it could possibly even cause a

disturbance strong enough to break windows. And that's another important thing to remember. The sonic boom actually travels with the object, it doesn't just happen when the object breaks the sound barrier. Those disturbance waves trail behind the aircraft, creating a sonic boom that follows along with the jet. So if a supersonic aircraft travels directly over a populated area and maintains that high speed, people in one town will hear the

boom shortly after the aircraft passes overhead. People three towns over will hear a boom as the aircraft passes them, So it's a traveling boom. More importantly, for this story, Yeager made it back to the ground safely and was no worse coming out of the experience than he was going into it, though I imagine it did aggravate his broken ribs. And Yeager's flight opened up interesting possibilities. Traveling at such high speeds could allow for much shorter flights

across great distances. I'll explain why that was important in just a second, but first, let's take a quick break. So traveling at high speeds allows for shorter flights across great distances. The only problem was companies would have to figure out how to design and build a passenger aircraft capable of supersonic flight to take advantage of it. Numerous airlines and aviation companies began to consider the possibilities, and some of them started to spit ball some design ideas.

It would take a while because this was super early days. Most of the early supersonic jets were really just men as research vehicles. A few were military vehicles, and none of them could travel at those high speeds for very long, nor could they really you the typical types of maneuvers that a passenger jet would have to do routinely. So what was needed was a commercial supersonic transport aircraft, or

an S s T as they were known. On November twenty nine, nineteen sixty two, the governments of Britain and France came together to propose a joint effort to develop such a passenger aircraft. It was a Concord Agreement, which is where the name for the aircraft came from. The treaty the two governments signed meant that both countries would share the costs and the risks of such an endeavor, and they weren't the only countries interested in developing an s s T. Both the then Soviet Union and the

United States were exploring the possibility as well. Boeing even received a contract in the United States to build a prototype, but that program ended in nineteen seventy one after a federal analysis concluded that the program would be too expensive with two uncertain to payoff to justify funding it, so that was put on the shelf. The Soviets actually saw their program through to completion. They built an s ST

called the Tupa Love or the TU one four. It got the nickname the Concorde SKI, somewhat uh narrow minded nickname for a supersonic passenger jet, but I find it particularly amusing because the TU one four had its first flight a couple of months before the Concorde would in nineteen sixty nine, and they even had their first supersonic

flight before the Concorde did. However, the Concorde would beat the t U one when it came to entering into commercial service to actually carrying passengers, and the Soviets would end up shutting their passenger program down after less than a year of being in service. But more on that later. Let's get back to Concorde. The French and British governments contracted various companies to develop the components for the aircraft.

One of the two companies responsible for developing the body of the aircraft was the British Aircraft Corporation or b a C. That was a pretty complicated story in itself. That company was the result of the merger of several other British aviation companies, and it could merit its own podcast. B a C itself would later end up merging with other aviation companies, and these days we know it as British Aerospace. The other company responsible for developing the aircraft

body was France's Aerospecial, which I'm sure I'm butchering. There's going to be a lot of butchering of French names in this episode. I make apologies for it, but I am an ignorant American type anyway. Aerospace cl was a state owned aerospace manufacturer, and it also has a any complicated history. The state owned companies are a very different thing from the types of companies we tend to think about.

In the United States, Aerospacel would have its own complicated corporate journey, and most of what was Aerospacel is now part of the company. Airbus engine design fell to France's I really apologize for this Society Nacionale dettude at the construction de Motirosa or SNECKMA s n e c M A. SNECKMA is way more fun for me to say. And it also fell to a British company, Rolls Royce. Yep, Rolls Royce wasn't just a super duper fancy car manufacturer.

They make jet engines too, if you weren't familiar with that. Now, I'll talk about the physical design of the aircraft first. I'll get to the engines later. Remember when I said an object moving about as fast as sound owned uh would be catching up to the sound waves that it's actually producing. And that the object moves faster than sound, it's breaking through the sound barrier. And that sound moving through the air is really all about fluctuations and air pressure.

That means you have to design an aircraft that can punch through a wall of air pressure to break through that barrier. For that reason, the Concord's physical design featured a body shaped sort of like a needle. A Concorde jets fuselage measured nine and a half feet wide or

two point seven meters. A seven forty seven, by comparison, would have measured a twenty feet or six point one meters wide, But the Concord's length of two d two feet or sixty one point seven ms was nearly as long as a seven forty seven, so it's much more narrow but almost as long as this other aircraft. The Concorde could hold a total of one passengers, with two seats on either side of a sin troll aisle, so you have rows of four, two and two and twenty

five of them. You would never have a middle seat, which is pretty awesome. You would only ever have a window seat or an aisle seat. The typical flight crew on a Concorde flight included a pilot, a co pilot, a flight engineer, and six cabin crew members, so a full Concord jet with a typical crew would have on six people on board. Some flights actually had more crew members on it than the typical six, so that wasn't always the case. Also, the experience aboard of Concorde was

pretty darn posh. We're talking caviar and champagne. I'm guessing that's where Robin Leach had all those dreams. And if you don't know who I'm talking about, you need to go over to YouTube and search for lifestyles of the rich and famous. Anyway, back to the physical design of this aircraft, the nose of the Concorde was really interesting. It was actually move a bullet, wasn't fixed or bolted into place in the way that you would think of a normal aircraft. There was a reason for this. It

was to give pilots more visibility on the ground. Whenever they were regg getting raid for takeoff or when they were approaching for landing, the nose could actually be tilted down thirteen degrees and that would provide the pilot's more visibility. Otherwise, the nose was up so high that they couldn't really see what was kind of in front of them on the ground. Once the air pilots could engage the controls and the nose would tilt up to its in flight position.

In addition, the Concorde had a delta wing design. The wing swept back into a triangular shape and joined to the fuselage of the aircraft all down the length of the wing, as opposed to say, the wings of a jet like the seven seven, which has rectangular wings that stretch out from the sides of the fuselage. It doesn't go all the way back the body of the plane. It's called a delta wing because the shape resembles the

Greek upper case letter delta, which is a triangle. The design allows for a really strong wing that can stand up to the rigors of high speed, subsonic and supersonic flight. It's a design used in lots of military jets, and the Space Shuttle program in the United States used a delta wing design as a basis for their orbiter. The design reduces drag at supersonic speeds while still allowing for sufficient lift for takeoff and landing at subsonic speeds, and

it also provides stability. It eliminates the necessity for horizontal stabilizers on the aircraft's tail. That design also meant the Concorde had a steeper angle of attack for takeoffs and landings, so I imagined flying on one of these was a bit of a thrilling experience. If you've ever had to fly in or out of an airport that had specific ordinances that required a steeper than normal flight path. You might have a hint of what it was like to

be on a concord. Now, I'm going to talk about the engines in just a second, but I figured it would be a good time to give you an idea of what takeoff was like on a concorde. The jet would accelerate from zero to two hundred twenty five miles per hour or three hundred sixty two kilometers per hour in just three seconds, so that acceleration would push you back into your seat all by itself, never mind the fact that you would soon be climbing at a steeper

than normal angle. Another thing engineers had to take into consideration was the wear and tear that air pressure, friction, and heat would have on the concorde. Traveling at supersonic speeds meant that the aircraft body would heat up considerably

as high pressure air moved against the plane's surface. Measurements showed that the concord's surface temperature during supersonic flight would range from one seven degrees celsius or two hundred sixty one fahrenheit at the nose of the plane down to ninety one degrees celsius or one six degrees fahrenheit at the tail. All that heat was bound to have an

effect on the lane. In fact, the air frame of the Concorde would expand seven inches or seventeen point eight centimeters during flight, so you can imagine that repeated flights could cause some serious structural problems if the plane is effectively changing shape by the magnitude of seven inches. For that reason, engineers used a special aluminum or aluminium if you prefer alloy, and that was known to be heat tolerant as well as lightweight, so it made a good

material for the airframe. Another way engineers chose to deal with that heat was to coat the Concorde in highly reflective white paint. It was paint designed to be about twice as reflective as what you would find on other jets at the time. So what about the engines. Well, the Rolls Royce SNECMA Olympus five nine three turbojet engines could each create eighteen point seven tons of thrust or one eight kilo Newton's and each Concorde had four of

those engines. Collectively, they burned six thousand, seven hundred seventy one gallons or twenty five thousand, six hundred twenty nine liters of jet fuel per hour, and there were seventeen of them on each concord. Those seventeen tanks could collectively hold thirty one thousand, five hundred sixty nine gallons or one hundred nineteen thousand, five hundred liters of kerosene jet fuel, and some of that fuel wasn't used to make the jet go. It was actually used to help balance the

plane itself. The Concorde had three auxiliary fuel tanks called trim fuel tanks. There were two in the front and one in the tail, and their purpose was to help with flight stability and orientation. When the Concorde would reach supersonic speeds, its aerodynamic center would shift backward. That caused the plane's nose to lower and point downward. To counter that tendency, the Concorde could pump fuel backward into the

trim tank near the tail. The redistribution of fuel would make the Concord's center of gravity match its center of lift, and the plane would level out. As the plane left supersonic speeds, the system would pump fuel into the forward fuel trim tanks to essentially do the same process, but in reverse because the jets nose would start to point upwards,

so they needed to counteract that action. These engines attached directly to the underside of the concord's wings, rather than using engine struts as is more typical in jet plane designs.

So why deviate from the standard, Well, engineers concluded that engine struts wouldn't be able to stand up to the stresses of supersonic travel, so the jets need to be directly integrated into the wing design, and it was collectively decided that a supersonic jet having an engine fly off due to turbulence would be what is called a bad

thing in aviation. The jet engines used a technology commonly found on military superscient jets after burners, So to understand how those work, it helps first to have a refresher on how jet engines work in general. So think of a jet engine as a machine that takes incoming cold air, heats it up tremendously, and jects it as outgoing hot air at a high velocity, and this creates forward thrust.

Because every action has an equal but opposite reaction, So inside a jet engine are the following components you have a compressor, a combustion chamber, and a turbine. And if you were to have like a cross section of a jet engine and you're looking at it from front to back, that's the order you would see them in compressor, combustion chamber, turbine. Now I'm going to talk about the compressor and the turbine parts first, because the compressor's operation depends upon the turbine.

So the compressor is essentially a series of bladed fans. So, for the purposes of an analogy, imagine you have ten fans that you've taken out of box fans, you know, the kind of fans that you would put in a in a window. So you've taken ten of those, and you've taken the fan blades out of all ten, and you've mounted them all on the same pole. But the fans that are in the odd numbered positions, so one, three, five, seven, and nine, those can freely rotate around the pole. But

the even numbered fans have been bolted in place. The poll is going to remain stationary. The fans that are bolted to it will remain stationary. The rotating ones can freely move, and somehow magically, you've created a method to make them rotate in the direction you need them to go in. I don't care how you do it. Maybe you've got a Wand so the rotating fans are rotors

and the fixed fans are statters. Now, imagine you've en cased this entire thing in a tube, and as air moves into the tube, you have these turning fans, and it pulls the air in and compresses the air as well. As the air continues to move past, both the rotors and the statters and the rotating fans add more pressure to the air. And as the air pressure goes up,

so does the air temperature. Now that's what's going on in a jet engine, but in a jet engine, it's happening on steroids and the turbine on the other end of this system is what is providing the rotational force to move the compressor rotors. So in between those two components is the combustion chamber, and that's where jet fuel gets injected and then burned. It's ignited, and that heats

the air that's passing through the jet engine. The air is coming from the compressor through the combustion chamber, it's combining with jet fuel. It's getting ignited. That heats the air up into super hot gases that then pass through the backside of the combustion chamber. The heat causes air to expand, and by shaping the end of the jet engine so that air can only really escape from a relatively narrow exhaust port, you end up getting a lot

of thrust. You've increased the speed at which the gas is going to come out the back of the jet, and that increases the thrust on the jet, or a forward thrust movement. The hot air has to leave and you've only provided the one exit, so it moves to that high speed and you get that forward thrust on the way out. The hot air actually turns that turbine, so the hot air is passing through the turbine that's creating the rotational force, and it transmits the rotational force

to the compressor blades, the rotors specifically. So what does an afterburner do because that's just a regular jet engine. Well, there's a hint in the name. After Burners are components used in some jets to provide additional thrust, and the way they do that is to heat up that exhaust gas to even higher temperatures in order to increase the velocity of the gas as its exhaust staying out the back of the jet engine, so that provides more forward thrust.

You've just increased the velocity of the escaping gas. So why not just do that in a normal jet engine? Why not just soup up the combustion chamber so that it heats up the air even more. Well. The parts of a jet engine can only withstand so much heat, and by parts, i'm mainly talking about that turbine that's used to provide the rotational force to the compressor rotors. If you heat it up too much, then it's going to destroy that turbine and you're going to have a

complete engine failure. So, and after burner comes after the turbine of the jet engine, you get this hot gas. It's just passed through the turbine, imparting some rotational force to it, and that exhausted gas, which still has some air that wasn't all consumed in combustion, combines with a little more jet fuel and goes into another after burner combustion chamber, and that's further back in the overall engine.

That increases the temperature of the exiting gases significantly, which increases the velocity of the escaping exhaust and boosts the thrust. Inside the afterburner chamber, you would find some sort of lining that would actually help protect the jet engine casing from all that heat. The lining would be extremely heat resistant. Typically there beholes in it as well to help deal with some of the noise coming from this combustion chamber.

Otherwise that noise would become uh this very strong vibrational energy that could cause structural damage to the actual jet, because that's how much how much energy we're talking about here, It's it's a huge amount. And then you would have the end of the chamber, which would be a converging and then diverging nozzle. So the chamber converges in tilts inward. It creates that narrow path for the gases to flow through, and then the nozzle diverges or widens out to allow

them to disperse into the atmosphere. And ideally the size the the width of that divergence is such that the pressure of the exhaust coming out equals the air pressure that the aircraft is moving through, and you have a very efficient system. Otherwise you have some other factors you have to take into consideration, but it gets way too complicated, so we're not going to go into that for this discussion.

So how about some performance stats. We talked about what's going on inside the engine, but what does that actually translate to. Well, the Concord's top cruising speed was one thousand, three hundred fifty four miles per hour, which is two thousand, one seventy nine kilometers per hour. It's also known as mock two point zero four. They'll keep in mind the

speed of sound depends upon lots of stuff. Sound actually travels slower at high altitudes than it does at sea level under typical atmospheric conditions, but again we won't go into that. The Concorde also cruised along at a much higher altitude than other jets did, typically at around sixty thousand feet or eighteen thousand, three hundred. Contrast that to the good old Boeing seven forty seven, which was a standard aircraft in United States service for a really long time.

It would cruise at a speed of around five hundred sixty miles per hour or nine hundred one kilometers per hour, and it would do so in an altitude of around thirty five thousand feet or ten thousand, six hundred seventy five, so the Concorde would travel in an altitude nearly twice as high as A seven seven and more than twice as fast, almost three times as fast s seven forty seven.

While the first prototype Concord to take flight did so in March nineteen and the first one to go supersonic did so in the fall of that year, there was still a lot more testing to do before people could

buy a ticket and travel on one of these. The first transatlantic test flight between London and New York happened on September ninety three, and the first passenger service would follow three years later on January one, nineteen seventy six, and initially you could fly between London and ball Rain, or Paris and Rio de Janeiro. A bit later service extended from both London and Paris to Washington, d C. And New York City, and a lot miller was to follow.

But let's take a quick break, so you could travel from London or Paris to DC or New York City. And then there were a few other routes that would be added seasonally, but they were all limited because the noise the plane created as it flew overhead meant that the airlines had to be really selective of their routes to avoid causing too much of a disturbance overpopulated areas.

They tried to limit their flights over the water, not over the land, so there are only so many places you could go, and no one on land one of their days to be punctuated by constant sonic booms. So the concords blistering speed did help for those transatlantic flights. It meant you could hop on the concorde and at a flight from London to New York and you could get there in about three and a half hours if you factor in another half hour for all the taxiing

and other procedures. It meant that you would be landing in New York about an hour before you left London. Because London is in the time zone we designate as being Coordinated Universal Time or u t C what we used to call Greenwich meantime, New York is at UTC minus five, meaning it's five hours behind London on standard time. So if you take off from London at noon and you land in New York three and a half hours later,

and then you have all the taxing and stuff. You'd be stepping off the plane with a local time in New York being eleven am, so from the perspective of your watch, you've actually landed an hour before you took off. Of course, back in London it would be four pm, but that's not nearly as much fun when you want to walk around and pretend that you're a time traveler. Now, obviously that only works if you're traveling west. If you're going east, you have to add time zones to your

travel time. But still the flight time itself would be back significantly. And perhaps the most important thing is that as a passenger, you're not stuck on a concorde as long as you would be on another passenger jet. You get to spend more time at home or at your destination and less time traveling, and that's a pretty cool experience.

It was also an expensive experience. If we had just for inflation, a round trip ticket between London and New York City would set you back about twenty thousand dollars. But the Concord's reputation is tied to more than impressive speed performance. It's also tied to tragedy engineering problems, political and social hurdles, and economic factors that collectively brought the program to an end. In the early two thousand's. The

Concorde aircraft had a reputation for being mechanically difficult. Usually the mechanical failures were non critical, but there was one terrible instance where that was not the case. On July twenty, two thousand, a flight leaving Paris for New York crashed just after it took off. All aboard the plane died in that crash, as did a few people on the ground.

An investigation concluded that there had been a loose strip of metal on the runway, and that when the Concorde passed over the metal, it tore into one of the jets tires. The tire blew out, and pieces of the tire got pulled into either the engine or the fuel tank, or both, and caused a fire on the port side engine. The aircraft then crashed into a hotel. The accident prompted both the UK and France to ground their Concord planes. Now, despite the high price for a ticket, the venture was

losing money. Fuel and maintenance costs for the aircraft were sky high. Pun intended the oil crisis of the early seventies hurt the Concorde before it even entered into passenger service, with several airlines canceling orders for the aircraft and so operating the Concord fleets was largely a money losing proposition. Ultimately, it became pretty clear that the service was too risky

and not economically viable. On top of that, there was the environmental impact created by burning so much jet fuel on every flight. However, I should point out typically the Concorde would burn less fuel than other jets because the flight time was so much shorter on a Concorde, so yes, it burned more fuel per hour, but its spent fewer hours in the air. There was also concern that at the high altitude that that exhaust could end up having a negative impact on the ozone layer. So there were

a lot of environmental concerns related to the Concord. In addition, because the aircraft couldn't fly over land without causing a ruckus, Asia was off limits. The jets didn't have the fuel capacity to travel west from Europe and get all around the world to get to Asia, and business travel was shifting more towards Asia as time was going on, which wasn't a factor when they were first planning the Concorde.

The Concorde seemed like it was too high a cost to cut down on travel time by a few hours across the atlant The convenience did not justify the expense, and it was just not making money, and that high cost had been a problem from the very beginning. Just developing the Concorde went way over budget. According to Ross Aimer, the CEO of Arrow Consulting Experts quote, cost overruns were tremendous, going from seventy million pounds to one point three billion

pounds end quote. Both Air France and British Airways would cease Concord flights in two thousand three. Out of the twenty Concord jets ever built, only fourteen ever served as passenger aircraft, seven in the UK, seven in France. After being grounded, some of the planes were disassembled, while others were put into museums. But what about the other supersonic transport aircraft that I mentioned earlier, the Tupolev or the

Concord Ski. Well, it took flight a couple of months before the Concord's first test flight, and it achieved supersonic flight, first being the Concord by four months in the summer of nineteen sixty nine, but the actual passenger service in the Soviet Union didn't start until after Concorde entered service. So what happened In nineteen seventy three a t U crashed during the Paris Air Show, possibly probably due to

pilot error. While going through some complicated air maneuvers, the aircraft broke apart and fourteen people died, six on the plane and eight on the ground. The highly publicized accident put the passenger program on ice in the USSR and delayed its roll out until November one, nineteen. It was

reportedly a much noisier experience. Like the Concorde, the t U one four could only achieve supersonic flight through after burners, but they apparently used military after burners and they was produced a lot of noise along with all that thrust. So the TUO design, as I understand it, didn't mitigate that noise very well, and so passengers would endure a loud, vibraty, shaky flight and that didn't sound very pleasant. The only serve US they had was between Moscow and Kazakhstan, and

flights were rarely full. The service completed fifty five passenger flights before being canceled. It was already destined to be mothballed when another fatal accident happened. On May twenty three, nineteen seventy eight, a t U one caught on fire near Moscow and made an emergency landing. The two fatalities

were flight engineers. The unreliability of the aircraft and the absence of economic incentives to continue running passenger flights meant the t U one forty four would transition into running mail carrying jobs and serving as a test bed for aerospace operations. Only seventeen t U one forty four were ever built, including the prototypes, and from what I've seen, the last flight of a t U one forty four happened in nineteen Several companies and organizations are working to

build a new generation of super fast planes. We're not talking supersonic necessarily, we might be talking hypersonic. These would be aircraft capable of traveling at insane speeds like mock five or faster. NASA tested such an aircraft back on November six, two thousand four, a year after Concorde had shut down. The aircraft had the designation X forty three A, and the X tells you it's an experimental aircraft. It's set a world speed record for a jet powered aircraft

at mock nine point six. That's nearly seven thousand miles per hour or eleven thousand, two hundred sixty five kilometers per hour. Now that wasn't an ss T. The X four three A was an unmanned test vehicle. It's meant as a proof of concept, but it is just one example of how NASA continues to research hypersonic vehicles. Companies like Boeing have shown off concepts of hypersonic passenger planes. At the a I a A Aviation Forum in two thousand eighteen, Boeing unveiled a concept of a passenger jet

that would, in theory, hit speeds of mock five. Instead of a conventional jet engine, the hypersonic aircraft would use a ramjet once it hit high speeds. That's because the speed it would travel out would cause a turbine to spend so fast it would break apart. Ram jets use the forward motion of the aircraft itself to compress the air into an afterburner chamber, so the hypersonic jet would likely have turbojet engines for the slower speeds, the subsonic

and maybe supersonic speeds. Then a valve would allow air to bypass the turbo fans and go straight to the ramjets. However, I wouldn't get too excited because most estimations put the launch date of such a service at twenty to thirty years in the future, So if you need to get to wherever you're going faster than that, you could probably

just walk there. In addition to figuring out how to fly really fast, engineers are working on how to reduce the profile of aircraft so that they can in turn reduce the sonic boom effect, making the aircraft more practical over a larger numb of flight paths and not just over the ocean. Back at NASA, engineers have been experimenting with jet body designs and have proposed an aircraft called the X fifty nine QUEST. The s T is not an ST in quest. It is an uppercase SST for

supersonic transport, which is cute. Lockeed Martin is building that jet. If it works as the engineers intended, this test vehicle should be able to travel at supersonic speeds, not hypersonic, but supersonic speeds without creating as explosive a sonic boom. The goal is to make a more modest boom. In fact, the agency calls it low boom. No boom isn't really

an option because you know physics. And besides NASA, there are other companies like Virgin Galactic, which is partnering with of course Boom Technology to build a quiet supersonic jet, and Spike Aerospace. Yet another company is also in the race for quiet super fast flight. The company closest might

be Arian Corporation. With support from Airbus, it is producing a supersonic business jet called the A S two and that should have a top speed of around mock one point five, so not as fast as the Concorde, but still pretty darn fast. However, it's also a low capacity jet. It has room for twelve passengers per plane, so I'm guessing that's gonna be a pretty tough ticket to score. The question remains whether or not these types of jets will be commercially viable with the cost of operating them.

Is it ever going to mean that the operational costs will be low enough so that companies running supersonic flights can make a profit without setting stratospheric and that's also upon ticket prices. Or are you going to need to take out a second mortgage if you ever want to get a plane ticket on one of these things. My guess is that supersonic and definitely hypersonic travel will be

luxury options. There will be an option that really only a select few will be able to take advantage of the truly wealthy, uh and connected, unless somehow the economies of scale takeover and make things cheaper. I doubt you're going to find your standard options whenever you log into your airline to include supersonic flights at budget prices. But I could be wrong. I hope I am. It would

be awesome if that were the case. It would be great to get to places faster, but I suspect that, at least in the near future, that's not going to be the case. But that wraps up this discussion of the Concorde. Happy birthday, Concorde, Welcome to the Big five. Oh um, I guess you're not up too much because you retired back in two thousand three. Retirement sounds nice. Send me a postcard, let me know how that's going for you. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes

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