7 ms·

there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation, as far as i am aware, since the concorde was grounded. there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going sup

there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation, as far as i am aware, since the concorde was grounded. there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic. this is significant because it's the first civil aircraft to reach that milestone since the ending of the concorde program.

dmitrygr 2y ago
> there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation There still isn’t, and this is not a very interesting stepping stone. We already knew that we could fly a plane quickly. This company has no engines for their allegedly full scale plane. The last manufacturer dropped them a few years ago, and there has been no movement in that direction. This demonstrates the easiest part of what they’re trying to do, not the hardest. This is the equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation”, while not at all addressing the “AGI” part
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bangaroo 2y ago
  i don't disagree with any of that, i'm extremely skeptical that they will ever scale this up however: there is, now. this is a civil aircraft flying supersonic, which is still some sort of interesting fact.
  - dmitrygr 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - bangaroo 2y ago
      i don't. i'm explicitly choosing not to be pedantic and instead hoping you'll take what i say as what it obviously is intended to mean and not as a very specific and accurate phrasing to be disassembled and torn apart without acknowledging the overall intent of the message.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    "Civil" supersonic aircraft is a designation, that's it. Like the other comment said - you can fly supersonic military jets with a civilian designation as long as the jet is deemed airworthy. The real question is whether this will ever scale up to be a passenger aircraft. There are still a huge number of unsolved problems, many of which plagued the Concorde in the best of years. I don't think a scaled demonstrator is going to give people the confidence to denounce traditional passenger jets.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      This is the first supersonic aircraft in a long time that started as a civilian one and was never intended for military applications. Loses points for the military engines though. Still impressively cool.
      - talldayo 2y ago
        "in a long time" kinda doesn't matter to me. America hasn't built a supersonic bomber "in a long time", you'll have to excuse me for not caring. The value of such a weapon is dubious and only made sense in a hype-laden Cold War environment. Similarly I don't think we've learned the lessons of the Concorde yet. Not only do people not need hypersonic flight, it's going to create a premium class of hydrocarbon emissions that is already bad enough with passenger aircraft. Progressive countries will ban operation (much like they did with the Concorde) and routes will have to be changed. Removing the afterburner and making the boom quieter simply isn't going to bring these skeptics onboard, and they're right to remain skeptical.
        bangaroo 2y ago
        as a person who likes airplanes (and airliners in particular,) i think it's cool that a commercially-focused aircraft manufacturer has managed to return to a type of flight that has primarily been relegated to military operations for a very long time today i am not thinking any further ahead than "wow, they did a really cool thing and made a supersonic test platform for a commercial airliner." there will be lots of future questions and concerns but we are far off from them, because they are not even close to scaling this up and there are so many gaping holes in the plan that i don't take it seriously at the moment. i just think the little plane is neat.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Do none of the private jets like G6s or whatever fly supersonic?
    - bangaroo 2y ago
      nope. commercial and private jets generally cap out around mach 0.9 i am very rusty on the economics and details of supersonic commercial flight, but the general gist as i recall is: - going much faster scales up the cost of flying at a rate that's hard to justify for how much time it saves. there is less case in the 2000s for "having to be in london in 3 hours from NY" than there previously was, too. - noise restrictions and such limit the usefulness of planes that are set up to fly that fast as people don't like being underneath constant sonic booms, so the routes that supersonic passenger flights were relegated to are mostly over water. it is just way cheaper and easier to fly subsonic, and if you're on a private jet anyway it's not like you're uncomfortable while traveling.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        And the range in which supersonic really gets interesting (to wealthy people/execs) is trans-Pacific. My dad got upgraded to the Concorde once from NYC to London and his reaction was more or less eh. Glad to have done it once but I'm now arriving in London at rush hour rather than having a nice dinner in first class.
        chgs 2y ago
        There ar every few day flights from the US to Europe. A lunchtime flight arriving at 8pm is far nicer than 5 hours sleep on an overnight flight or the 7am flight. West bound being able to leave the office at 6pm and be in New York to pay the kids to bed is great.
        ghaff 2y ago
        Yes, the question is how many thousand dollars out of your own pocket great which would be the situation with most people.
- esotericimpl 2y ago
  [dead]
- ctippett 2y ago
  We've already been to the moon before, but I for one would be excited to see it happen again.
- WillPostForFood 2y ago
  The equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation” would be a hand drawn mockup of a supersonic plane, not a functional supersonic plane.
- rvz 2y ago
  Might as well tell the folks at SpaceX to not land on the moon because it we already "knew" we could do it because it has been already been done before. This sort of pessimism to dismiss this achievement is exactly how to lose and stay comfortable. Ladies and gentlemen, dismiss the above take.
  - dmitrygr 2y ago
    And if someone proposed to run a company for flying to the moon after every rocket engine manufacturer actively and overtly dropped them and they had no rocketry experience themselves, I would be equally skeptical.
- mshook 2y ago
  I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're right: they have the technology, they don't have an engine, and this just looks like a civilian version of a fighter jet pretty much (except it has 3 turbojets). And what people always fail to mention when it comes to supersonic flights is one of the main issue is neither a technological nor an economical one nor a supersonic boom one. Traveling west bound is great: you leave in the morning and you arrive, local time, before the local time of your origin point. But traveling east bound isn't that great: you still have to leave in the morning and you land in the evening, so the only thing you gained is a shorter flight time but not a full day of work or shopping or what not. So on regular flights (because Concorde was profitable, at least on the French side, thanks to charter flights), people would fly Concorde to go to NYC and fly back on a red eye... As someone who worked for and flew on Concorde, I think what they're doing is amazingly cool though and I hope they succeed. But I'm still unsure what the long term plan is...
  - jdminhbg 2y ago
    > I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're right OP is being downvoted for saying there is still not supersonic civil aviation on a video showing a civil aircraft going supersonic.
    - mshook 2y ago
      Fair enough...
    - creer 2y ago
      You are right - (And it's not a civil aircraft just because it's painted white.)
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Right. Whether I arrive in London at 4pm or 8pm doesn't really make much of a difference. (Admittedly it probably lets you arrive on the continent without a red-eye--depending on supersonic over land rules--as you pretty much have to do today.)
creer 2y ago
There has not been supersonic civil aviation but "supersonic" is not the interesting point here. "Supersonic" is easy and solved often in aviation. The question is what else can they do to make it work. And there is no aircraft yet, just a scale model. Progress sure but not because "supersonic". The new engine would be more interesting. And how is this a civilian aircraft? It is a cool one-off single seater with three military engines (oops, civilian engines derived from military and used in business jets - still not cheap for a one-seater). Two-seater for some definition of "technically". But perhaps they can sell a few of these to private pilots and then it would be a supersonic civilian aircraft. One pilot and one passenger if we insist on making it a business jet.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Supersonic is “easy” in the sense that rocket design is “easy.” Orbital rockets were still out of reach of non-government-funded efforts until SpaceX, and supersonic flight is still the sole domain of government contractors now. Boom is changing that.
  - creer 2y ago
    Easy of course in the sense that that many aerospace engineers and aircraft have done it all over the world for many years. And most "government contractors" in the capitalist world are civilian private companies, many of which build both military and civilian aircraft and started small. Which means, for example, that even this small private company knew pretty well what to look for in wind tunnel tests and other materials work. Their first transonic and supersonic flight was stable, did not destroy the aircraft, did not kill the engines, etc. Even, presumably, broke through the sound barrier the first time they tried - and was fully expected to.
dingaling 2y ago
> there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic. Both the Cessna Citation TEN and the Bombardier Global 8000 were taken supersonic during test flights, as they have to demonstrate stability at speeds of M0.07 greater than max cruise. They aren't certificated to do it in service, but structurally and aerodynamically have no problem. Long-range business jets have been pushing aeronautical boundaries well beyond the mundane airliner state-of-the-art.

dmitrygr 2y ago

> there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation There still isn’t, and this is not a very interesting stepping stone. We already knew that we could fly a plane quickly. This company has no engines for their allegedly full scale plane. The last manufacturer dropped them a few years ago, and there has been no movement in that direction. This demonstrates the easiest part of what they’re trying to do, not the hardest. This is the equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation”, while not at all addressing the “AGI” part

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bangaroo 2y ago
i don't disagree with any of that, i'm extremely skeptical that they will ever scale this up however: there is, now. this is a civil aircraft flying supersonic, which is still some sort of interesting fact.
- dmitrygr 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - bangaroo 2y ago
    i don't. i'm explicitly choosing not to be pedantic and instead hoping you'll take what i say as what it obviously is intended to mean and not as a very specific and accurate phrasing to be disassembled and torn apart without acknowledging the overall intent of the message.
- talldayo 2y ago
  "Civil" supersonic aircraft is a designation, that's it. Like the other comment said - you can fly supersonic military jets with a civilian designation as long as the jet is deemed airworthy. The real question is whether this will ever scale up to be a passenger aircraft. There are still a huge number of unsolved problems, many of which plagued the Concorde in the best of years. I don't think a scaled demonstrator is going to give people the confidence to denounce traditional passenger jets.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    This is the first supersonic aircraft in a long time that started as a civilian one and was never intended for military applications. Loses points for the military engines though. Still impressively cool.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      "in a long time" kinda doesn't matter to me. America hasn't built a supersonic bomber "in a long time", you'll have to excuse me for not caring. The value of such a weapon is dubious and only made sense in a hype-laden Cold War environment. Similarly I don't think we've learned the lessons of the Concorde yet. Not only do people not need hypersonic flight, it's going to create a premium class of hydrocarbon emissions that is already bad enough with passenger aircraft. Progressive countries will ban operation (much like they did with the Concorde) and routes will have to be changed. Removing the afterburner and making the boom quieter simply isn't going to bring these skeptics onboard, and they're right to remain skeptical.
      - bangaroo 2y ago
        as a person who likes airplanes (and airliners in particular,) i think it's cool that a commercially-focused aircraft manufacturer has managed to return to a type of flight that has primarily been relegated to military operations for a very long time today i am not thinking any further ahead than "wow, they did a really cool thing and made a supersonic test platform for a commercial airliner." there will be lots of future questions and concerns but we are far off from them, because they are not even close to scaling this up and there are so many gaping holes in the plan that i don't take it seriously at the moment. i just think the little plane is neat.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Do none of the private jets like G6s or whatever fly supersonic?
  - bangaroo 2y ago
    nope. commercial and private jets generally cap out around mach 0.9 i am very rusty on the economics and details of supersonic commercial flight, but the general gist as i recall is: - going much faster scales up the cost of flying at a rate that's hard to justify for how much time it saves. there is less case in the 2000s for "having to be in london in 3 hours from NY" than there previously was, too. - noise restrictions and such limit the usefulness of planes that are set up to fly that fast as people don't like being underneath constant sonic booms, so the routes that supersonic passenger flights were relegated to are mostly over water. it is just way cheaper and easier to fly subsonic, and if you're on a private jet anyway it's not like you're uncomfortable while traveling.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      And the range in which supersonic really gets interesting (to wealthy people/execs) is trans-Pacific. My dad got upgraded to the Concorde once from NYC to London and his reaction was more or less eh. Glad to have done it once but I'm now arriving in London at rush hour rather than having a nice dinner in first class.
      - chgs 2y ago
        There ar every few day flights from the US to Europe. A lunchtime flight arriving at 8pm is far nicer than 5 hours sleep on an overnight flight or the 7am flight. West bound being able to leave the office at 6pm and be in New York to pay the kids to bed is great.
        ghaff 2y ago
        Yes, the question is how many thousand dollars out of your own pocket great which would be the situation with most people.
esotericimpl 2y ago
[dead]
ctippett 2y ago
We've already been to the moon before, but I for one would be excited to see it happen again.
WillPostForFood 2y ago
The equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation” would be a hand drawn mockup of a supersonic plane, not a functional supersonic plane.
rvz 2y ago
Might as well tell the folks at SpaceX to not land on the moon because it we already "knew" we could do it because it has been already been done before. This sort of pessimism to dismiss this achievement is exactly how to lose and stay comfortable. Ladies and gentlemen, dismiss the above take.
- dmitrygr 2y ago
  And if someone proposed to run a company for flying to the moon after every rocket engine manufacturer actively and overtly dropped them and they had no rocketry experience themselves, I would be equally skeptical.
mshook 2y ago
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're right: they have the technology, they don't have an engine, and this just looks like a civilian version of a fighter jet pretty much (except it has 3 turbojets). And what people always fail to mention when it comes to supersonic flights is one of the main issue is neither a technological nor an economical one nor a supersonic boom one. Traveling west bound is great: you leave in the morning and you arrive, local time, before the local time of your origin point. But traveling east bound isn't that great: you still have to leave in the morning and you land in the evening, so the only thing you gained is a shorter flight time but not a full day of work or shopping or what not. So on regular flights (because Concorde was profitable, at least on the French side, thanks to charter flights), people would fly Concorde to go to NYC and fly back on a red eye... As someone who worked for and flew on Concorde, I think what they're doing is amazingly cool though and I hope they succeed. But I'm still unsure what the long term plan is...
- jdminhbg 2y ago
  > I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're right OP is being downvoted for saying there is still not supersonic civil aviation on a video showing a civil aircraft going supersonic.
  - mshook 2y ago
    Fair enough...
  - creer 2y ago
    You are right - (And it's not a civil aircraft just because it's painted white.)
- ghaff 2y ago
  Right. Whether I arrive in London at 4pm or 8pm doesn't really make much of a difference. (Admittedly it probably lets you arrive on the continent without a red-eye--depending on supersonic over land rules--as you pretty much have to do today.)

creer 2y ago

There has not been supersonic civil aviation but "supersonic" is not the interesting point here. "Supersonic" is easy and solved often in aviation. The question is what else can they do to make it work. And there is no aircraft yet, just a scale model. Progress sure but not because "supersonic". The new engine would be more interesting. And how is this a civilian aircraft? It is a cool one-off single seater with three military engines (oops, civilian engines derived from military and used in business jets - still not cheap for a one-seater). Two-seater for some definition of "technically". But perhaps they can sell a few of these to private pilots and then it would be a supersonic civilian aircraft. One pilot and one passenger if we insist on making it a business jet.

adastra22 2y ago
Supersonic is “easy” in the sense that rocket design is “easy.” Orbital rockets were still out of reach of non-government-funded efforts until SpaceX, and supersonic flight is still the sole domain of government contractors now. Boom is changing that.
- creer 2y ago
  Easy of course in the sense that that many aerospace engineers and aircraft have done it all over the world for many years. And most "government contractors" in the capitalist world are civilian private companies, many of which build both military and civilian aircraft and started small. Which means, for example, that even this small private company knew pretty well what to look for in wind tunnel tests and other materials work. Their first transonic and supersonic flight was stable, did not destroy the aircraft, did not kill the engines, etc. Even, presumably, broke through the sound barrier the first time they tried - and was fully expected to.

dingaling 2y ago

> there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic. Both the Cessna Citation TEN and the Bombardier Global 8000 were taken supersonic during test flights, as they have to demonstrate stability at speeds of M0.07 greater than max cruise. They aren't certificated to do it in service, but structurally and aerodynamically have no problem. Long-range business jets have been pushing aeronautical boundaries well beyond the mundane airliner state-of-the-art.