Posted on 03/22/2012 1:01:49 AM PDT by U-238
In retrospect, the Concorde was doomed from the start. Besides being fuel-hungry, the legendary supersonic jet created sonic booms that were simply too loud for comfort, which prevented the aircraft from flying lucrative overland routes, such as New York to Los Angeles, and kept it an expensive luxury.
More than a decade after Concorde was retired, researchers are investigating new ways to build supersonic aircraft by going back to an old idea: the biplane. New research, most recently from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shows promise for solving both major challenges to supersonic transports—cost and noise—by turning to this configuration long abandoned by aircraft designers.
Ahead of Its Time
Back in 1935, German aeronautical engineer Adolf Busemann proposed a radical solution to a problem that did not yet exist. In that era, airplane builders foresaw that biplanes would soon be replaced by single-wing aircraft. But without access to modern computational tools, Busemann attacked the theoretical problem of supersonic flight and showed that biplanes could actually exceed the speed of sound without creating the hefty shock waves (and resulting sonic booms) that jets such as the Concorde would encounter, and with a minimum of drag. In Busemann’s biplane design, the noise-producing shock waves would not propagate outward from the front and rear of the craft, but rather from between the two sets of stacked wings, canceling each other out.
There was one major catch (besides the fact that it wasn’t actually possible to build the plane with 1935 technology): Busemann’s biplane design would work only at a set design speed, say Mach 1.7, and then only if the proposed craft first accelerated to a much higher speed, Mach 2.18, before dropping back to reduced-drag flight at Mach 1.7.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
Just let them BOOM, no big deal once they are away from the city.
I rarely read beyond the excerpts, so this post is a real tease.
Let me guess, the unspecified deceleration from Mach 2.18 to Mach 1.7 creates a counter pressure facilitated by the extra wing coverage?
This is the complete paragraph:
Busemann’s biplane design would work only at a set design speed, say Mach 1.7, and then only if the proposed craft first accelerated to a much higher speed, Mach 2.18, before dropping back to reduced-drag flight at Mach 1.7. Getting up to that much higher speed would be dicey and perhaps impossible, given the extreme drag encountered on the way.
Wonder how many of those duped white-guilt people are still smiling now?
LOL! And to think females accuse men of ‘thinking with their genitals’. The TRUTH however is that when all candidates are male, females vote with their genitals because they sure as heck aren’t using their minds when voting for 0bama. 0bama and his handlers know that, hence, ‘the War on women’.
“HRRRRRR, I’m a plane”...Ka-BOOM!
He’s also the only Space Shuttle left flying.
It looks like a TIE fighter. Would make a hell of a killer drone.
Strap a M.O.A.B. to that thing and land it hard in Detroit
(or Chicago)
you can almost see captain crane...
Elements of Aerodynamics of Supersonic Flows by Antonio Ferri, MacMillan Company, New York, NY, 1949, page 154:
The Supersonic Biplane ... The basic idea of the Busemann biplane is ..."
Another picture. I'm not sure what it looks like.
Where do you put all the fuel for the engines?
I knew they forgot something. Perhaps in the wings?
Current airliners have their fuel in the wings for the most part. Two wings, twice the fuel storage.
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