Could a resurgence of interest in supersonic passenger flight help to power the civil aviation sector out of the COVID-induced doldrums?
From mass redundancies to cancelled orders for new aircraft, the drastic reduction in air-travel triggered by the pandemic has had an eye-watering impact on the civil aviation sector.
But could a new generation of supersonic passenger jets help forge a new role for the industry, and provide an opportunity for some of the world’s most innovative aerospace engineering organisations?
Despite the notable cancellation of the Rolls-Royce / Airbus E-Fan X project – which had hoped to demonstrate the world’s first large hybrid-electric passenger jet – the sector has been keen to stress that low carbon innovation remains front and centre of its plans for the future. But a slew of recent announcements would suggest that it might be looking elsewhere for the big opportunities of the future.
As previously reported by The Engineer, there has been growing interest in supersonic passenger flight for a number of years now – largely amongst a community of disruptive startups keen to open up new opportunities in a crowded industry.
But this interest now appears to have crossed over into mainstream. Rolls-Royce Plc (the company that powered Concorde) is collaborating with Virgin Galactic on the development of a propulsion system for a MACH 3 passenger aircraft.
The company has also joined forces with Reaction Engines on the development of supersonic and hypersonic propulsion systems technologies. And – as if that wasn’t enough – it’s also collaborating with supersonic startup Boom on engine systems for the the company’s Overture supersonic aircraft.
There’s also growing interest from many of the industry’s other major players. For instance, Rolls-Royce rival GE Aviation is reported to be making progress on its Affinity supersonic engine – which is expected to be used on a 10 passenger supersonic business jet under development by Boeing backed startup Aerion Supersonic.
With the “pack-’em-in”, high volume business model perhaps irreparably damaged by the pandemic, is a new compelling business case emerging for a faster, more socially distanced , and more expensive mode of air travel? Are we heading into a new era where passenger flight largely becomes the preserve of the wealthy few? Or is the technology currently under development compatible with civil aviation’s pre-Covid and future passenger growth plans? And could this growing interest in high speed flight mark a shift away from the sector’s much vaunted low carbon plans?
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An obscene and totally environmentally destructive idea. Concorde proved decisively that this is not needed.
If the Covid fiasco has taught us anything it is that we don’t need to travel to work effectively.
The rich don’t need fast transport, if they do then let them fund their own supersonic coffins and pay huge offset taxes and business certainly doesn’t need people travelling vast distances at supersonic speeds for meetings that can be done online.
We need to make the air industry we already have much more environmentally efficient and we need to make it more expensive, people need to pay for the real cost of air travel.
Yes supersonic travels are the future
This is completely inappropriate, we have a climate emergency.
Perhaps the aviation sector should be focusing on a 50-50–50 option for short and medium range travel. 50% reduced fuel consumption, 50% quieter and 50% cheaper to own and operate compared to the current best in class equivalent.
The doom mongers will press for aviation to be deleted as a travel option but it has a role which it is difficult to deny for domestic and cross border flights in Europe.
Turbo-props could be a potential answer .
Regardless of the environmental lobby complaints (understandable), it will be the economics that kills it off. Development costs will huge, consequently cost per aircraft v.high, likely orders minimal, RTI non-existant. Concorde…been there, ..done that.. same end result
I regret to say it, but I believe the age of supersonic commercial air travel is over.
The difference in the RR/RE collaboration (and RE’s founders were all ex-RR anyway) is that the Sabre engine is hydrogen powered which, super, hyper or subsonic must be better then throwing even more CO2 into the atmosphere. The issue of whether we need it is something else of course – whether OZ./NZ actually want to be only 4 hours from the UK is a question only Australians and New Zealanders can answer!
Hydrogen powered, Mach 2.7 SSTs have been studied since 1974. You can indulge in ecohysteria if you want & shut down the modern world, but many people will die if you do. 7 billion+ people need technology to survive.
Better to be pragmatic. A switch to hydrogen fuel would counter much of the criticism of air transport. Low supersonic speed (Mach 1.2 to 1.7) new airliners can be shaped (area ruled) to produce no supersonic boom at ground level.
Capacity needs to be at least 110 (50 lie flat business/first, 60 economy+) to be viable.
Range needs to be at least 5000 nm, preferably 6000 nm, to have enough city pairs to make the network large enough.
Travel for business and pleasure must be restored as soon as possible: this is human development at its best. The idea that the air industry is a significant contributor to global CO2 is nonsense, it is as minor as the UK’s (0.5 %) contribution to the so-called, but, as yet, unmeasurable “climate emergency”.
Supersonic travel could make Australia and New Zealand easy destinations (rather than 2-days each way), I’m ready to book!
The idea of supersonic travel last time around was good in principle, but was scuppered to a large extent when foreign governments refused to allow supersonic flight over their land mass. New supersonic/hypersonic flight may have a role for journeys over large water mass provided the range is there. It may also have a role in assisting space launches, however let us not fool ourselves into thinking that it will develop into an economic multi people carrying system for many years to come if ever.
We need to increase air travel not remove it!!! Travel has enabled us to see different cultures, different countries, has increased prosperity allover the world and is vital to the global economy. Supersonic air travel is a wonderful idea, to bring the world closer together. Climate change and saying aviation is a major polluter is total nonsense and has been grossly overhyped. Making plane travel the preserve of the wealthy would be very cruel, when foreign travel should be free for all. Everyone from all walks of life should have the right to global travel as it is vital for mental and physical well being and a wonderful form of education
“another steve” has hit the nail on the head…. anyone heard rumours of something called “global warming”, quite nasty I believe.? MInd you, its not us who will catch a world without winters and an Africa without rain, so why worry about adding more heat-trapping pollutants to our atmosphere?
Sabre engines are the only environmentally proposal which would allow high Mach flight. As it’s output is water.
We should be funding that. As it is a real thing which works?
Thankfully not everyone looks through such myopic glasses. Without the outstanding engineering and scientific wonders of the last century we would be walking or riding a horse in cities whose primary source of dust was manure. Transmission of information was smoke signals on a clear day, or you were truly fortunate you lived in a city with a telegraph office. All of these issues were very expensive to mitigate, many where highly successful, most were monetary disasters. However at the end of the day society, mankind for that matter moved forward looking for the next bear to wrestle.
Concorde suffered initially due to bans being placed on supersonic flight overland,I’d expect the same to be applied to future aircraft unless it was guaranteed not to produce any sonic booms. To do this would limit the crafts capacity thus making it way to expensive an option for ordinary folks to use unless they’d won the lottery. I’d love to be able to travel to Australia or any other country in the southern hemisphere in hours rather than days,but I don’t buy lottery tickets so will never be able to afford to travel that far.
Concorde flew the Atlantic in around 3 hours, return ticket price £8000. Say a ‘standard’ first class return costs £3000 and, journey time 6 hours. Add a 2 hour security check-in and 2 hours baggage reclaim, customs and immigration clearance at the US end.
Supersonic: travel time 7 hours
Subsonic: travel time 10 hours + £5000 spending money in your pocket
Apart from highly exceptional circumstances (top brain surgeon called in to carry out a complex operation, billion dollar business deal in the balance) most people would I suspect take the money.
If , nevertheless, these private companies believe there is a market for supersonic aircraft by all means go ahead. But not a penny of public money should be spent on the venture
Concorde was politically killed, not failed. It is a disgrace that as engineers we are now even talking about going another step back, to turbo props. Where next – sopwith camels? This generation will be remembered (briefly) as the one that killed off and reversed technological development.
Socially distanced air travel will not be an economic reality, so better find a vaccine pronto.
Isn’t this perverse mindset directly analogous to HS2 ? Pump all the money into one, huge vanity project that benefits virtually no-one and ignore the basic travel needs of the many.
Shouldn’t we as engineers be working to better the world we live in ? Not, be wasting our skills to provide some vacuous ‘right to travel’ and despoil all corners of the planet at high speed.
If the hydrogen technology is as good as touted then, yes, let’s develop it but develop it for efficient mass travel, not for high speed cocktail lounges for the morally challenged.
Comparisons to HS2 are nonsensical. HS2 is existing long-proven technology used in most countries across Europe, Asia and the rest of the world. MachH is new, exciting, and should be pursued. That a private company is doing so means at some point they will want to recover their costs – good for them. If it can be developed as a phase 2 to a mass-market solution even better, but Mach travel tends to rule out wide-bodied solutions.
Perverse to try? – sorry I thought we were engineers, not sheep.
Should we be slowing down instead of speeding up. Maybe air buoyancy should be revisited and electrical / fuel cell powered ships with some form of sails is the future. Although I know very little of alternative materials, now we have carbon fibre and graphene wouldn’t air ships be inherently safer than they were in the 1930’s. But to get the greatest lift hydrogen again?
I am not sure how the technology can be applied, and there is little information as to that (for example as the aeroplane might go into a near fractional orbit then the distance of landing points might not be significant in fuel and payload).
I view it as a possible initial niche technology for hydrogen powered flight. However thought into how to reduce manufacturing costs and increase payload (eg electric launcher) .
It may be that the innovative flight path offsets the low (volume) energy density of hydrogen and the technology could be applied to larger lower cost markets.
In addition I suspect that the higher velocity options might be relevant to low earth orbit and launching into.
I suspect that Concorde was aimed at a premium market – and then no consideration was given as to low cost options – but have to see if innovative solutions are pursued …
But there is little detail of the aircraft designs and how innovative they might be (for example near surface cooling, by the cold helium, might enable aluminium structures to be lightweighted for high temperature operation)
John, I beg you to read and completely analyze “The Fallacy of the Dirigible”, an extraordinary document originally published in… 1912 (!) at https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a33577063/dirigible-history/
Which explains the many shortcommings of the “LTA” or “lighter than air” craft in a surprisingly accurate manner, to the point of analyzing the available lift of even vacuum (nothing lighter!), and the futile weight savings, the slow speed and the wind restrictions!
Back in 1984, at the Engineering Firm I work for, we performed a complete research project on the (im)probable substitution of the Helicopter for the transport of cargo and crews to Offshore Oil Platforms, and we found that a “modern” dirigible with all that “advanced” (but certainly not miraculous) materials, gas turbines instead of reciprocating engines and all the electronic gadgets, will still be very vulnerable and impractical, and that even a partly successful “modern” dirigible was at least 30 years in the future, if ever (a truly accurate prediction!) One thing is to fly a nice large display over Football Stadiums, another completely different is to have a practical passenger or cargo LTA. And even Dr. Norman Mayer, the LTA expert in charge of the then NASA-Comitee on LTAs, and a very knowledgeable person with actual flying and construction expertise on Blimps, told us “there was no way the still to be built “modern” dirigible, would ever replace a helicopter”, and that he was packing his things because the LTA-Comitee would soon cease to exist, after years of researching LTAs…
Personally, I truly wish the few people still dreaming at building a successful modern LTA the best of the best, but when faced against strong gusty winds, the large exposed area of a sufficiently large dirigible becomes its worst enemy. Back in 1984, there were several enterprises involved in the research or looking for funds to develop dirigibles (N.A.S.A., TCOM-Div. of Westinghouse, Summit Research Corp., American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and UK based “Airship Industries Ltd.”… but after more than 35 years, there are today even fewer designs trying to fulfill that kind of (pipe) dream.
The question as posed makes little sense mixing up should with can.
Absent government intervention supersonic personal jets will be built once the uber rich have amassed a big enough slice of the world’s wealth to make development viable. Evidently lots of builders now think that point has been reached.
Should they be allowed is a different question. Accreting the money will, IMO, do more harm than the carbon emissions. Not unlike superyachts. And that alone is reason enough to ban them.
Mass supersonic travel OTOH would accelerate our looming environmental disaster. Though the Reaction Engines / HOTOL model with a long enough coasting phase could conceivably, eventually, perhaps use less fuel than a conventional long haul flight. Long shot though.
@Hannah Driver… Really? So because there’s more pollutants down here justifies pumping a few more up there. Really? Climate change is overhyped. Really? Not seen the impending disaster of the melting permafrost in northern Russia? Not seen the heating up of Earth towards its poles at a rate faster than at any time in history? Bring the world closer together. Really? Ah, so close in fact that pandemics spread like wild fire. Oh, and them as well. Getting much worse I believe. Been to California or Australia recently? I shall finish by echoing the sentiments of Another Steve. Well said sir.
Fortunately, the inventiveness and creativity of our engineers and scientists are unconstrained by difficulties and unfazed by prophesies of doom. We learned early in the industrial age that public safety did not require a flag bearer to walk ahead of a locomotive. Technical progress has always engendered a degree of negative reaction from some of the public but we do go forward eventually. Caution is sensible but moving backwards, technically, when confronted with difficulties has never been, nor ever will be, a solution. Initiative and boldness, have served this country well in so many ways, I feel sure we shall continue in that vein.