NASA wants to bring back supersonic air travel with its X-59 jet.
Why don’t we have supersonic aircraft any more? Although commercial supersonic air travel kicked off in the 1960s with the arrival of the Concorde, since that jet was retired in 2003, there are no supersonic jets in common civilian usage any more. Part of that is because the Concorde was expensive and difficult to maintain, and the increase in speed wasn’t worth the huge bump in money and effort it took to keep it flying.
Recommended Videos But NASA wants to show that faster-than-sound travel is possible without the annoyance of the boom, which is where its X-59 experimental aircraft comes in. The X-59, built by Lockheed Martin, is designed to create a “thump” rather than a boom when traveling past the sound barrier, with the aim to make it less annoying to those people beneath.
“The first phase of the engine tests was really a warm-up to make sure that everything looked good prior to running the engine,” said Jay Brandon, NASA’s X-59 chief engineer. “Then we moved to the actual first engine start. That took the engine out of the preservation mode that it had been in since installation on the aircraft. It was the first check to see that it was operating properly and that all the systems it impacted – hydraulics, electrical system, environmental control systems, etc.
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