ORAC
31st Aug 2006, 09:50
New York To L.A. In Two Hours With New 12 Seat Lockheed Jet
New York, NY (AHN) - Lockheed Martin's advanced Skunk Works unit is designing a small, 12-seat passenger jet that would travel at 1,200 mph without emitting large amounts of sound.
The air plane is aimed for the business executives and diplomats. It will fly at nearly twice the speed of conventional business jets and have a range of 4,600 miles nonstop. This mean one can fly from Los Angeles to New York in just over two hours.
The slim 130-foot-long QSST (for "quiet supersonic travel") aircraft is being designed for a Nevada consortium called Supersonic Aerospace International, or SAI, at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion..............
It could be ready for boarding by 2013, according to the company.
Frank Cappuccio, Skunk Works' executive vice president told Wired news, "Our design uses innovative aerodynamic shaping and employs a patented inverted V-tail that is instrumental to the radical reduction in sonic boom."
Designers expect the QSST to make a sonic boom less than a hundredth that of the Concorde's aural impact. Concorde was prohibited from flying at supersonic speeds over the United States in the 1970s owing to its excessive noise produced by pressure waves colliding in the plane's wake. But the modern computer-aided design software has made it a quieter by using the "boom reshaping" techniques pioneered by military test fighters.
New York, NY (AHN) - Lockheed Martin's advanced Skunk Works unit is designing a small, 12-seat passenger jet that would travel at 1,200 mph without emitting large amounts of sound.
The air plane is aimed for the business executives and diplomats. It will fly at nearly twice the speed of conventional business jets and have a range of 4,600 miles nonstop. This mean one can fly from Los Angeles to New York in just over two hours.
The slim 130-foot-long QSST (for "quiet supersonic travel") aircraft is being designed for a Nevada consortium called Supersonic Aerospace International, or SAI, at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion..............
It could be ready for boarding by 2013, according to the company.
Frank Cappuccio, Skunk Works' executive vice president told Wired news, "Our design uses innovative aerodynamic shaping and employs a patented inverted V-tail that is instrumental to the radical reduction in sonic boom."
Designers expect the QSST to make a sonic boom less than a hundredth that of the Concorde's aural impact. Concorde was prohibited from flying at supersonic speeds over the United States in the 1970s owing to its excessive noise produced by pressure waves colliding in the plane's wake. But the modern computer-aided design software has made it a quieter by using the "boom reshaping" techniques pioneered by military test fighters.