Supersonic flight, a longtime dream for makers and owners of private planes, is inching closer to reality.
Nine
years after the last trip of the Concorde jetliner, the quest for speed
without window-rattling sonic booms is spurring research by billionaire
Robert Bass, General Dynamics Corp.’s Gulfstream, Boeing Co., Lockheed
Martin Corp., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and
others.
The efforts signal that the time may finally be nearing
for corporate aircraft flying faster than sound, about 750 miles (1,207
kilometers) per hour at sea level. Technological leaps since the
Concorde’s development in the 1960s are converging with the willingness
of globe-trotting chief executive officers to pay more for ever-bigger
and longer-range jets.
“Most all of the manufacturers have done
size, have done luxury and opulence,” said Andrew Hoy, a managing
director at broker ExecuJet Aviation Group in Zurich. “Time is the
biggest opportunity for them all and the only differentiator left.”
High
operating costs and scant demand for the Concorde’s premium fares
forced its retirement in 2003 after 27 years in service. The 100-seat
jets streaked from New York to London at twice the speed of sound,
slicing travel times in half to about three hours.
Planemakers
took away a lesson in supersonic economics: It may be easier to find
CEOs and wealthy individuals who crave faster corporate aircraft than to
persuade airlines to invest in a Concorde successor.
‘More Sense’
“Given the
amount of fuel you need to burn to achieve supersonic speeds, it’s going
to be a more expensive proposition that only a sliver of the market is
going to pay the price for,” said George Hamlin, president of Hamlin
Transportation Consulting in Fairfax, Virginia. “When you’re talking
about a supersonic business jet, that begins to make more sense.”
The
largest corporate planes already cost almost as much as the smallest
Boeing and Airbus SAS airliners, and can fly about 90 percent as fast as
sound. Gulfstream’s G650 lists for $58.5 million. Bombardier Inc.
(BBD/B)’s Global 7000 and 8000 jets retail for as much as $65 million.
Warren Buffett’s NetJets unit ordered 20 last year.
The chief
obstacle to supersonic flight is the same one that bedeviled the
Concorde: the sonic boom. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration
outlawed such flights by civilians over land in 1973 because of the
noise, and other countries followed.
FAA Rules
Reversing
that ban will be pivotal to any revival of supersonic travel, because
the planes would lose their business case if they can’t fly at top
speed, according to Savannah, Georgia-based Gulfstream.
“That
requires a solution to the sonic boom problem, and that’s where our
research efforts are focused,” Preston Henne, Gulfstream’s senior vice
president of engineering and test, said during an aviation conference in
Orlando, Florida, on Oct. 29. “We continue to make progress on that.”
NASA
expects to start building a demonstrator plane in 2016 to show that
disruptive booms can be minimized, and that jet may fly after 2020,
according to Peter Coen, chief of supersonic research. In an industry in
which Boeing’s Dreamliner took more than a decade to go from the Sonic
Cruiser concept to first delivery, that’s not a long-range timeline.
“This
is a high-value niche market; the winner here will be the first to
market,” said Brian Foley, an aviation consultant based in Sparta, New
Jersey. “That’s why there’s interest and that’s why there’s motivation
for these people to keep on trying.”
Risks Ahead
Success
for a new generation of planes is hardly assured, said Foley, who spent
20 years as marketing director at Dassault Aviation SA (AM)’s Falcon
business-jet unit.
No follow-on aircraft has emerged since Air
France and British Airways parked their Concordes, which were grounded
for more than a year after the 2000 crash in Paris that killed 113
people when one of the Air France jets struck runway debris.
The
planes slurped twice as much fuel as a Boeing 747 jumbo jet with only
about a quarter of the passengers, and round-trip tickets in 2003
fetched as much as $13,500, then the sticker price on a Dodge Neon
compact.
While new designs and engines may tame the roar
billowing from a supersonic jet in flight, engineers still must muffle
the so-called focused boom, the sharp crack that occurs as a plane first
goes past the sound barrier. Emissions and maintenance on
high-performance engines also remain challenges.
‘Magic Number’
“It doesn’t
matter which manufacturer is working on it at the time, when you ask
them when it’s going to be a reality, they generally all say, ‘Within 12
years,’” Foley said. “That seems to be the magic number. It doesn’t
matter if someone asks them in 1980, 1990 or 2000, there will be one
within 12 years.”
Supersonic-flight boosters such as NASA’s Coen
see reason for optimism. Planemakers can employ more-powerful engines,
use new materials such as the lightweight composites on Boeing’s
Dreamliner and draw on years of aeronautical knowledge from the
Concorde’s operations and from making supersonic warplanes.
Gulfstream
is experimenting with a telescoping rod protruding from a jet’s nose to
disrupt the sound waves that cause sonic booms. Bass, a co-founder of
investment firm Oak Hill Capital Partners LP, has hired a NASA research
jet to test a high-speed wing design from his Aerion Corp.
Boeing
and Lockheed (LMT) have devised supersonic concepts with slender
fuselages and rear-mounted engines to damp drag that contributes to the
noise. NASA is testing models as long as 3 feet (0.9 meter) in wind
tunnels and studying nozzles from General Electric Co. (GE) and
Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc (RR/) for future engines, Coen said.
‘Pretty Close’
“We
were able to achieve both good aerodynamic elements and low sonic boom
simultaneously,” Coen said. “We think we’re there or pretty close. That
was a really exciting development over the past year.”
After
holding public meetings on supersonic flight from 2008 through 2011, the
FAA is shifting to gather data from NASA and industry groups as it
weighs noise regulations.
“Current research has demonstrated
enough progress on reducing impact of sonic booms before they reach the
ground for us to revisit this issue,” the FAA said in an e-mailed
response to questions. No new public sessions are scheduled.
Bass’s
Aerion doesn’t want to wait for any regulatory changes. The Reno,
Nevada-based company has a low-drag wing design that it says will allow a
jet to fly efficiently at subsonic speed over land and at as much as
Mach 1.6, or 1.6 times the speed of sound, over the ocean.
Aerion
was in “deep discussions” on a planemaker partner to build the craft as
the recession began in late 2007, Chief Operating Officer Douglas
Nichols said. Before the economy tanked, Aerion had 50 commitments for
an $80 million supersonic plane, Nichols said. Bass declined to comment
on Aerion through a spokeswoman, Marcia Horowitz.
“We have a
thoroughly committed and patient investor who believes these things and
is heavily involved in the business,” Nichols said. “The next frontier
is speed and the industry will get there sooner or later. Our wish is
sooner.”
Source: http://www.businessweek.com
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