The comeback of supersonic flight

cleveland.com : In the labs and wind tunnels of NASA’s Glenn Research Center and three other NASA facilities—Langley, Dryden, and Ames—the prospect of commercial supersonic flight is quietly coming out of mothballs. The back-to-basics plan lacks the hype of the government’s three previous high-speed flight research efforts, which touted a future of large American-produced commercial supersonic fleets but failed to produce a viable design. “The programs in the past...were setting targets that were very audacious, to say the least,” said Jay Dryer, director of NASA’s Fundamental Aeronautics Program , of which supersonics research is a part. “I think we’re going in with a more realistic expectation of what’s possible, yet we’re still pushing the state of the art.” This time, NASA is taking an incremental approach. It intends to pave the way for small faster-than-sound “low-boom” business jets by 2015, 35- to 70-passenger commercial jets by 2020, and quiet airliners with the capacity and Mach 2 speed of the Concorde sometime after 2030. “It’s the next step in the evolution of the transportation system,” said Glenn engineer Louis Povinelli, the supersonics project’s senior technologist and chief scientist . “It’s inevitable.”