Brief history of commercial supersonic jets and why we have commitment issues.

Commitment issues to supersonic travel that is, not your love life.

“I’ve changed….”

History and past experiences have proven that line to be the biggest piece of lie he/she/they can ever tell you. Even if you’re an emotionally intelligent bastard, you know you’ve stopped and thought at least once “what if it’s true? could it be really different this time?”. Setting our delusions aside, NASA comes forward with another proposal for commercial supersonic flight with it’s X-59 aircraft on Jan, 2024.

What’s supersonic flight? If you can yeet anything faster than the speed of sound, that’s called going supersonic.

The first person to fly and exceed speed of sound was a U.S. air force captain Chuck Yeager in a Bell X-1 aircraft. The logic behind designing the fuselage (the body) of Bell X-1 was peak science. What item do we have that goes beyond speed of sound? Bullets. Let’s shape it like a bullet.

This penguin-looking aircraft was less of an aircraft and basically a rocket with wings. It doesn’t have a jet engine, it has a liquid-fueled rocket engine at it’s end chanting ‘Force = Mass x Acceleration’ as it flew by. I know you don’t care about numbers much so I’m not touching on them as much as that guy in my class touches me.

Concorde : competing with Drake on tip length

Once upon a time, the land of unseasoned chicken and the land of baguettes decided to make a commercial supersonic aircraft now known as ‘The Concorde’ which took its first transatlantic crossing on September 26, 1973. It was operated by Bri’ish airways and Air France until it didn’t. Concorde is basically that high maintenance partner that takes up a lot of your expenses that you could be blowing on coffee or plants and makes a lot of noise for the surroundings (that noise includes the Sonic Boom). So eventually both Bri’ish airways and Air France decided to dump it in May, 2003. The event that really acted as a catalyst to their eminent break-up was the engine failure that occurred on July 25th (year 2000), when the tire burst and the debris caused the fuel tank to rupture. This un-oxygenated the 100 passengers, 9 crew members and 4 people on the ground. The un-profitable and problematic nature of operating the Concorde or maintaining any supersonic aircraft drives our commitment issues.

New Promises?

Well, after the world has moved on, NASA decides to slide back in with the X-59 Aircraft developed by our military industrial complex enthusiast, Lockheed Martin. This research project aims to look into super-sonic flight without the sonic boom. How well does that go? I don’t know, they entered the talking stage so a situationship still remains. There is hope this time but I personally would be cautiously optimistic.