Cleaner,Faster Flight is on the Horizon

摘要

Aerospace innovators from government, commercial, and university arenas are developing technologies that would make supersonic flight over land possible, dramatically reducing travel time anywhere in the world. With these advances, engineers also are working to make aircraft more environmentally friendly, eliminating toxic emissions and reducing the amount of energy required for flight. NASA, for decades, has led the effort to study sonic booms - the loudness of which is considered the key barrier to enabling a future For overland, commer-cial supersonic aircraft.That future will be closer to reality when the agency's X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) airplane lakes to the skies in 2022, taking the first steps to demonstrating the ability to fly at supersonic speeds while reducing the sonic boom to a significantly quieter sonic thump. The Low-boom Flight Demonstration mission has two goals: 1) design and build a piloted, large-scale supersonic X-plane with technology that reduces the loud-ness of a sonic boom; and 2) fly the X-plane over select U.S. communities to gather data on human responses to the low-boom flights and deliver that data set to U.S. and international regulators.