Supersonic Business Jet

Aerion AS2

Since we're talking about airplanes, I thought I'd throw this one in. It's just speculation at this point, but there are at least three outfits thinking about building one. It's basically ridiculous. I mean who needs to shave a couple of hours off their New York to London flight time? But I guess the economics pan out:

“The message from many of today’s long-range business jet operations is very clear: they want a supersonic jet sooner rather than later; a cabin comparable in comfort to today’s long-range jets; a range of 5,000m or better; and they are willing to pay more than $100 million for such an aircraft. That is the supersonic jet we are working to deliver,” said Aerion CEO, Doug Nichols.

Problem with supersonic aircraft is the sonic boom, which can be very annoying for everyone who isn't on board, which is basically everyone. The number of people who fly on business jets is so small as to be inconsequential, except for the amount of power they control.

 But Aerion says that it can achieve what it calls "Boomless Cruise" in certain atmospheric conditions. This would allow it to fly at supersonic speeds without producing a sonic boom on the ground because the shock waves would "dissipate before reaching the ground."

 If you are flying at 60,000 feet there is hardly any air there. I wonder if those are the "atmospheric conditions" he is talking about.

Pretty airplane though, especially with those chrome rings around the engine intakes.

Supersonic catapult

How to Build a Supersonic Trebuchet
David Eade
I don't know why, but this guy's explanation of the math he used to design this device had me laughing. I'm not quite sure what it was that got me going. It's not that the math is nonsense, it might be, but without sitting down and studying it I have no idea. I think it was his delivery, though I can't pick out anything in particular. Maybe because he was cramming so much into such a short exposition.

In any case, his machine is very cool. I don't like how it is powered by rubber bands, I would prefer a solid weight, but to get the required force (Force = mass x acceleration, that much math I do know) might require a weight of several hundred pounds, which would make it much less portable. Unless you could somehow use the weight of a vehicle to drive it. (Jack up the back end of your car, attached the puller cable, pull the pin and release the Kraken.)

The stated velocity of 400 meters per second is well above the speed of sound and is higher than the muzzle velocity of most handguns. One reason I like shooting the 7.62 x 25 cartridge is because it is supersonic and delivers a nice satisfying crack when fired.

Now he needs to work on accuracy.

Via The Unwanted Blog

The Drones Keep on Coming

Shenyang J-6 Drone

Shenyang J-6

My Daily Kona has a story about how Red China is converting their fleet of aging J-6 fighter aircraft into drones. They are old and obsolete but still serviceable which means they could make excellent attack drones. China has a several airbases that are just a stone's throw from Taiwan and since the J-6 is capable of Mach 1.3 it would take it about 6 minutes to cross the 100 mile wide Taiwan Strait.

Chinese Airbases near Taiwan

China has several thousand of J-6 aircraft. Should they convert them all to drones and use them to attack Taiwan, Taiwan would have its work cut out trying to shoot them all down. Anti-aircraft missiles would be the weapon of choice. Conventional anti-aircraft guns have a hard time against supersonic aircraft.

Of course China has got its work cut out converting these aircraft into drones, and then there's the little matter of making them work. Who knows what kind of problems they are going to run into, especially if they try to get them to fly supersonic. I don't know that anyone is building supersonic drones. Yet.

My Daily Kona lists five Chinese air bases that are near the strait. I couldn't find all of them. Wikipedia has a list of about 170 Chinese air bases. I picked five that sort of matched Kona's list and plotted them on a Google Map.

Supersonic

Shockwaves from two T-38 aircraft flying supersonic - NASA

This photo was taken from a Beechcraft King Air that was flying above the T-38's. Since the T-38's were traveling like three times as fast as the Beech, timing was critical.

NASA Beechcraft King Air flying over the giant compass rose at Edwards Air Force Base in California

They did this before using ground based cameras shooting at the sun, which provided a nice collimated light source.


NASA Supersonic Flights Validate Flightworthiness for Future Schlieren Imaging
How they got the most recent image while looking at the ground is a mystery.

Sound Barrier

AVRO Arrow

From the Wikipedia article about the AVRO Arrow, a Canadian jet aircraft that was developed in the 1950's:

Avro engineering had been considering supersonic issues for some time at this point. Supersonic flight works in a very different fashion and presents a number of new problems. One of the most critical, and surprising, was the sudden onset of a new form of drag, known in the West as wave drag. Wave drag was so powerful that engines of the era could not provide enough power to overcome it, leading to the concept of a "sound barrier".

German research during the Second World War had shown the onset of wave drag was greatly reduced by using airfoils that varied in curvature as slowly as possible. This suggested the use of thinner airfoils with much longer chord than designers would have used on subsonic aircraft. These designs were impractical because they left little internal room in the wing for armament or fuel. However, they also discovered it was possible to "trick" the airflow into the same behaviour if a conventional thicker airfoil was used, swept rearward at a sharp angle, creating a swept-wing. This provided many of the advantages of a thinner airfoil while also retaining the internal space needed for strength and fuel storage. Another advantage was that the wings were clear of the supersonic shock wave generated by the nose of the aircraft.

First time I ever heard of "wave drag" or the reason for swept wings. And once again we've got Nazis in the mix. Will we never get shut of these warthogs?

Update May 2020 replaced missing picture.

Travel Part 2

The science fiction novel Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer is set 500 years in the future here on planet Earth. The situation is much like it is now, but technology is more advanced, there are more people, and we still have high-powered political rivalries. There have been wars and disasters but the great seething mass of humanity continues to muddle along.

Airline Flights

Flying cars are now commonplace. At any moment there are something like 800 million people traveling in the air*. Most trips are short range, but crossing the oceans is not a problem and if you were to watch the traffic patterns you would see the oceans covered with the tracks of aircraft.

ATLANTIQUE of COMPAGNIE de NAVIGATION SUD-ATLANTIQUE, interior an ART DÉCO masterpiece, but exterior utterly ultra-conservative - painted by © Eugenio Errea

While we like the sea, it can still be a very dangerous place, and while we sometimes need a little peace and quiet, we also need some stimulation, which usually means interacting with other people, so while we could stop in mid-ocean for a little quiet reflection, mostly we don't. We want to get across the ocean to where there are other people doing stuff, like cooking something good to eat. Mmmm, weird food.


Elon Musk wants to use SpaceX rockets to travel anywhere on Earth
Ocean liners were our first attempt at transporting people across the ocean on an on-demand basis. Then came flying boats and now we have jet airliners. You may heard about Elon Musk's idea to use ICBM's to transport people around the world. Crazy, but I suppose it could happen, right? I mean a hundred years ago who wooda thunk a week's wages could get you across the ocean in a day? Okay, a previous incarnation of Elon Musk probably thought it.

Coach

The problem with crossing the oceans in an airplane is that it takes a long time, and while you are traveling you are confined to a relatively small space. Okay, coach is more like cruel and unusual punishment. If you've ever flown coach you know what it's like, so you have no one to blame but your own desire to be somewhere else, like Australia.

SR-71

We have airplanes that go fast enough to cross the ocean quickly, but I don't think there is a single one that has the range. Plus they are gas guzzlers. No one wants to foot their fuel bill. That's why we have congress so they talk each other into allocating the funds.

Concorde

There were a couple of supersonic airliners, but they aren't flying anymore. I wonder why. No, I don't.

Gulfstream G650ER

Is a flying car that could cross oceans even feasible? Well, we have business jets, and I am sure there are some that are capable of long ranges. But they are still subsonic, so ocean crossings are still going to take hours and hours and you are still confined to a cell, a plush, comfy cell, but still a cell. No thank you. I like to be able to get up and walk around every once in a while.

Supercar

A super-sonic flying car would fit the bill. Some people are talking about building supersonic business jets and that may be the next step, but it's a very energy intensive kind of solution. I'm thinking a scramjet assisted Supercar might be what we want. That's going to take a while.

Photo by Erik Almås, © Dassault Systèmes

On the other hand, super-high altitude Zeppelins might do what we want. You get up high enough, like 70,000 feet, and the air gets thin enough that you should be able to push your Zeppelin along at current airliner speeds. And with something the size of a Zeppelin, you would have enough room to walk around so you could work out the kinks you acquire squoze into your comfort cell.

* right now there are about a million people in the air.

Part 1 here, and while these two parts might not seem related, this is what I was thinging about when I wrote that.

Russia Flies White Swans to Venezuela

Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers land in Venezuela for ‘combined operational flights’
[Old caption: I'm not sure what all the other aircraft are doing in this video, but we see a Tu-160 landing at the end, supposedly in Venezuela.]

Repurposed from the Google translation of the Russian blurb that came with this video:

Ten thousand miles in thirteen hours. The crews of two RussianTu-160 strategic bombers took off from Engels air base and landed at the airport in Maiquetia Venezuela. The route passed over Norway, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. While over Norway the Russian's were accompanied by two F-16 fighters. The Ministry of Defense in particular pointed out that all the flights were carried out in strict accordance with international regulations on the use of airspace.

Engels air base is across the Volga River from Saratov in Southwest Russia. A direct line between the two places on Google maps is only 6,800 miles. If Norway was the only European country they flew over, they would have had to go 1,500 miles North to avoid the rest of Europe. That's a lot of jet fuel. Dividing distance by time I get 770 MPH, which is supersonic. I kind of doubt whether they ever went supersonic on this flight. I don't think the fuel budget would accommodate those kind of shenanigans.

Update March 2020. Replaced missing video with one from 2018. Near as I can tell Russia has been flying Tu-160's to Venezuela since 2011.

Update April 2022 replaced missing video with one with the same title.

Isla La Orchila

Russian Tu-160 aircraft make flights in Venezuela
Russia has been flying TU-160's to Venezuela occasionally ever since Hugo Chavez came into power. The TU-160 is a supersonic bomber. It's the only large supersonic aircraft still flying. It's obsolete as weapon, but it is still big and impressive and so these flights make good propaganda.

La Orchila. 2 mile long airstrip in orange.

There has been some talk about Russia opening an air base on La Orchila, a desert island off the coast of Venezuela near Caracas. There is a big airstrip there, but not much else except rocks. It's under the jurisdiction of the military, and so off limits to everyone else. A group of ham radio operators got permission to set up camp there and run their radios, but no one else has shown much interest in it.

Los Roches, La Orchila & Caracas, Venezuela

La Orchila is about 80 miles off the coast of Veneuela and about 30 miles east of Los Roches archipelago, which is a National Park.

My take on this whole thing is that while the upper class was getting along very well in Venezuela before Hugo, the poor were not, and their frustration / desperation was what brought Hugo into power. Now we have Maduro in power, and he doesn't seem to understand the first thing about business, which is why oil production has fallen off and whole country seems to be going to hell. You'd think hanging with Putin he'd figure out that he needs to get his oil business running properly.

But maybe Putin is waiting until Maduro is really desperate so he can step in and save his sorry ass, for a price naturally. Can't really blame Putin for messing about with Venezuela, not after all the messing we (the USA) have done in his neighborhood (the Ukraine). Besides, all these despots need to stick together. Hah. Like they would. Stab each other in the back first chance they get more likely.

I suspect that property rights are at the root of this whole debacle. Pretty much all of Latin America runs on a 15th century model of property rights where the governor doles out land to his cronies and everybody else is screwed. As long as the upper class continues to squash the peasants, the communists are going to have people who are willing to listen to their bullshit, which is where we get revolutionaries.

If you want things to change, you need to give people an opportunity to crawl out of their hole without getting crushed in the process. Problem is, the upper class think they have to give up something, but if they can give the peasants an opportunity, they will reap rewards much greater than anything they are getting now. Hard to imagine, and that, I think, is the problem.

US Aircraft Carriers

USS Shangri-La Aboard the Aircraft Carrier USS Shangri-La, circa 1962, somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. From the film - Flying Clipper, (1962). With narration by Burl Ives.
The USA has been flying supersonic aircraft from carriers consistently for over 60 years. No one else's record comes anywhere close.

The Grumman F-11 Tiger was the first supersonic jet fighter to operate from an aircraft carrier. They started in 1956. Of the aircraft in the video, the Skyhawk is notable (in my mind) because Argentina had a bunch of them. The other jet fighter in the video is the F-8 Crusader. I seem to recall having a model of one when I was a kid. It wasn't a particularly good-looking aircraft, but it was certainly capable. John Glenn made the first super-sonic cross country flight in a Crusader in 1957. Along the way he refueled from propeller driven AJ Savage tankers. He would have had to slow down to hook up with the tankers since they weren't able to go that fast. I suspect no one has tried to perform in-flight refueling at super-sonic speeds.

The photo reconnaissance version of the Crusader was sent to take some pictures of the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis. The F-101 Voodoo was also sent. The Voodoo was a land based airplane and was not designed to work with aircraft carriers.

The Crusader had 'variable-incidence' wings, which means the wing was mounted on a pivot so that the angle of attack could be changed to make it possible for the pilot to see where he was going and allow the aircraft to fly slow enough to land on a carrier.

Watching the video, I noticed that right at the beginning of the catapult launch, a flap across the big air inlet under the nose opens up. Didn't find any explanation for it.


US Aircraft Carriers
At the start of WW2, we had eight aircraft carriers. During the course of the war, we built another 26. After the war, construction slowed down for a few years, but then in 1955 it picked up again and we've been building them pretty consistently ever since. We currently have eleven aircraft carriers. At a million dollars a day each, it's costing the average American family of four about a dollar a week to keep them all running.

I haven't figured out how to get the date to display across the bottom of the above chart, so I made up a little table to show the corresponding dates.


Correspondence of Days & Dates


Via daily timewaster

More aircraft carrier posts here.

Supersonic DC-8

DC-8  Test Flight with F-104 Chase Plane

It was only supersonic for a short period during a dive from 50,000 feet. Almost ended in disaster. Avgeekery has the story.

Future Blast

Aerion Supersonic Business Jet

Looks like some people are getting serious about building a supersonic business jet.

The Aerion AS2 has appeared here before.

Via FlightAware

Boom!

 

Boom Supersonic Prototype Business Jet

We have hardware, not flying yet and probably won't for another year, but it's a big step up from drawing plans. 

I've posted about supersonic business jets before, but the name Boom hasn't appeared.

Via FlightAware

Eclipse

Solar Eclipse taken by shooting through a couple of layers of old photographic negatives, just for fun. The thin sliver of sun is still enough to overpower the image sensor.

The eclipse was a little odd. I live maybe 50 miles north of where there was a total eclipse. Here the moon blocked out all but a little sliver of the sun. It didn't get dark, at best is was a little dimmer than full sunlight. My neighbor noticed that it was a little cooler. I didn't notice any temperature change, but then I don't pay much attention to temperature until I start to get uncomfortable. It was like 70 degrees here and if the eclipse caused the temperature to drop five degrees that would have been 65, which would still be comfortable, so for me it wasn't worth noticing. That's one of the benefits of carrying around an extra 50 pounds of fat.

Illuminated house number. Barely visible here, but it was bright enough to catch my eye.

A neighbor across the street has an illuminated house number that comes on when it gets dark. Well, presumably it comes on when it gets dark. I never noticed it before. But when the moon obscured most of the sun the light came on and when the eclipse was over the light went off. So I'm guessing that for the light sensor, it was getting dark.

Dustbury's post got me to wondering why the moon's shadow was traveling eastward when the sun is traveling westward (the sun rises in the east. Daylight advances ever westward across the face of the Earth).  A little math confused the issue even more. As simple as this problem ought to be, it took me several trials before I finally figured out what my model of this situation should look like.

Graph of Speed and Distance
Bottom scale is minutes
And yes, it's just a coincidence that the bottom scale is 400 minutes long.
Spreadsheet with Calculations

Consider the Earth and Sun as fixed, unmoving objects. The Moon passes between them and since the Sun, for all practical purposes, is infinitely far away, the shadow as it passes over the Earth is traveling at the same speed as the Moon. Imagine driving your car south near sundown, You and your car are going to cast a shadow to your left. The shadow is traveling right along with you. If you maintain 60 MPH, your shadow is going to maintain 60 miles an hour.

However, since the Earth is a ball and not a disk, this speed is only going to be seen when the Moon is is directly inline between the Earth and the Sun. Before the Moon starts to come between the Earth and the Sun, its shadow is simple traveling across space. When the Moon's shadow first impacts the surface of the Earth, it will be at a tangent, so its speed is infinite. As the shadow passes over the Earths surface, that surface will start turning more toward the sun and more at an angle to the shadow. By the time 40 minutes has passed it's speed has dropped to 2,000 miles per hour.

But the Earth is turning. At the equator that speed is about 1,000 MPH. Now we get to the rotation part. The moon goes around the Earth in the same direction that the Earth turns. Looking down on the Earth from above the North Pole, we see the Earth turning in a counter-clockwise direction. The moon is like-wise turning in the same counter-clockwise direction, but the Earth is turning much faster than the moon is going around. So if we were projecting the moon's position onto the Earth, we would see it move Westward, because the moon is slow moving and the Earth is turning underneath it.

The moon's shadow it traveling at the same speed as the moon (about 1200 MPH), which is just slight faster than the surface speed of the Earth, so as the Moon passes in front of the Earth, it is traveling just slightly faster than the surface of the Earth, so its shadow, the eclipse, moves from West to East.

1973 Concorde Eclipse Chaser
(Warning: autostart video)

So the speed of the eclipse depends on the time of day. If it strikes your area in the early morning or late evening it is going to be cooking along and you are going to need a supersonic jet fighter running on full afterburner to keep up with it. If it is during business hours, you could keep pace with a twin engine prop plane. I looked for some indication that NASA or the Air Force or someone had sent up a supersonic chase plane, but the only reference I found was for 1973 when somebody managed to commandeer a Concorde to record the eclipse.

Some commercial airlines arrange special eclipse flights.

P.S. All my calculations were done presuming the path of the Eclipse was over the equator. To more accurately model this eclipse, you would need to  factor in the latitude, which is constantly changing because apparently the orbital plane of the Moon is at an angle to equatorial plane of the Earth.

Pressure Wave

What we have here are (three) two-second clips from a Lockheed-Martin video of a ground attack rocket test. These clips show the missile just before it impacts the target, in this case a tank. Blutarsky noticed a small white flash just ahead of the missile near it's projected point of impact. nougabol tells us that it is the "Pressure wave from the missile hitting the tank." Since the pressure wave hits the target before the missile, you have advance notice that the missile is coming. Since the missile is supersonic, that time is very short.


Lockheed-Martin put out a press release about this test that is a veritable masterpiece of crap. I read the whole thing twice and I still have no idea what the hell they are talking about.

McLaren

McLaren road car at the McLaren Technology Center

Road & Track tells us about the pressure differential in the McLaren headquarters building that keeps the smell of food inside the cafeteria. Okay, I suppose you could do that, and it might be a good thing in a workplace, but having to go through an airlock to get your lunch . . . Whatever.

McLaren Can-Am Racecar circa 1970

When I was a teenager with a driver's license, my friends and I would go to the Mid-Ohio racetrack to watch the Can-Am / Group 7 cars race. In those days Jim Hall and his Chaparral and McLaren were the ones to watch. Their cars were built along the same lines as the Ford GT40, except without a roof. The important part, as far as I was concerned, was that they were all using big, 7 liter, all aluminum V-8 engines from Detroit. America, hoo-rah!

Bruce McLaren died on the racetrack in 1970. The company he founded has gone on and is something of a powerhouse in the high-performance automotive world.

Watching an episode of The Grand Tour a couple of weeks ago and they're talking about some exotic mobile, and Richard Hammond mentions that the people who buy these million-dollar go-fast toys have, on average, 64 other cars, which means they need a warehouse to keep them in and a staff to wrangle them (keep them clean and prepped and ready for the next time you want to take one for a spin). Or maybe you don't need a warehouse, you can just distribute them among your umpteen houses with their ten car garages. Whatever. You get the picture, we're talking the upper echelons of the one percenters here.

Now you might think that all this is a ridiculous waste of time and money, and from a pragmatic, go-to-work-and-save-your-pennies point of view, it is. On the other hand, all this activity employs a fair number of talented people, and most of their work is being done by hand, so they aren't putting their efforts into mass producing stuff that will put other producers out of work. It's really part of the entertainment industry, which in some respects is kind of like the defense industry: it absorbs a large chunk of money and produces very exotic stuff that no one really needs, but everyone wants, sort of. I mean it would be nice to have your own supersonic jet aircraft / race car, wouldn't it?

And just for grins, we have Tooned:


McLaren Tooned - Season 1 - Episode 1 - Wheel Nuts
Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button are real-life race car drivers. Alexander Armstrong is an actor. Not often you see race-car drivers with speaking roles, or at least that's the way it used to be. I suppose with zillions of dollars at stake, you might invest a little effort in polishing their public personas. And make no mistake, zillions of dollars are at stake. McLaren was fined $100 million for some kind skullduggery. The company is private, so they don't have to tell anybody how much they are worth, but I suspect it is somewhere north of $2 billion.

Tu-160

Russian Tupolev Tu-160

This is like a scene out of a science fiction movie. I know airliners routinely fly over the Arctic and snow-covered mountains, but they don't fly so low (unless they are landing in Switzerland), and airliners aren't supersonic. I dunno, it's just a heck of a picture. Also, I spent a couple of hours putting the puzzle together.

Previous posts that mention this airplane.

Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump

Mickey Mouse Club Intro (Color)
Dalton Barron
I was inundated this morning with people yammering about the shooting. It was all Trump, all the time, which led to the title, which led to the above tune. I'm surprised someone hasn't redone the tune with 

D-O-N, A-L-D  T-R-U-M-P replacing Mickey Mouse. I mean, they have the same number of letters. Disney would probably have a conniption fit.

So there was a lot of yammering but not much in the way of actual information. We do have this video. I got the link from daily timewaster.

The sniper was already watching the shooter. Why didn’t he shoot first! 🤔 pic.twitter.com/Ts72wqdG4t

— GentlemanJack (@xGentleManJack) July 14, 2024

We can hear 5 shots being fired in this video. After the first shot, the rooftop snipers don't seem to be aiming their weapons. Erik Prince posted this in a post on X:

Watching the newsreel one can hear how proximate the shooter is by the very short time lapse between the crack of arriving bullet (supersonic) to the boom of muzzle blast (sonic).  

I dunno about that, sounds like the action cycling on a semi-automatic rifle to me, and as those five shots came within four seconds, I think it very likely it was a semi-auto. 

Full Metal Jacket - Mickey Mouse song
BakotaNiN

This showed up while I was looking for the video at top. This one might be more appropriate.

Voodoo

Tam mentions .79-caliber Pontiac revolvers this morning, so I have to go check 'em out, whereupon I find they were used on the F-101 Voodoo, which I haven't heard mentioned in a coon's age. Being a witch doctor and all, I felt I probably should know something about this good looking airplane.

• Supersonic - 1100 MPH
• Active from 1954 to 1984
• 1500 mile range
• Vietnam War before being replaced by the F-4 Phantom
• Cuban Missile Crisis:

The U-2 gets top billing whenever we talk about spy planes, but as you can see the Voodoo was in there doing some of the grunt work.

SLICK CHICK

SLICK CHICK: The Wild Story Of The USAF's First Top Secret Supersonic Spy Plane
Not A Pound For Air To Ground

Other posts about Kapustin Yar:

• English Electric Canberra
• Russian Missile Launch

Post about aerial photography: Lucky 666

Slick Chick

MiG-21

Mig-21 facts that might surprise you
Fly with Magnar
I'm always surprised when I hear about old jet aircraft, and even more so when I hear about old Soviet aircraft. From the YouTube blurb:

First flown in 1955, the MiG-21 is the most produced supersonic airplane in the world.