Japan Plans Test of 'New Concorde'

Steve Nixon writes "Japan's space agency plans to launch an arrow-shaped airplane at twice the speed of sound high over the Australian outback as early as next month in a crucial test of the country's push to develop a supersonic successor to the retired Concorde."

Looks like ...

[grunherz]

I saw this this morning and all I could see was the abandoned Republic XF-103 [af.mil].

This is the next step

[Crixus]

Some sort of high altitude Concorde replacement is necessary.

    My choice would be a spaceplane of sorts that takes parabolic trajectories. I've been hearing about plans of a craft of this type that would get you from NY to Tokyo in 45 minutes.

  Burt Rutan WHERE ARE YOU?! :-)

  Sign me up.

Only 10 million?

[TurdTapper]

Wow, when was the last time the US did an experiment for that little money?

Of course, their last one crashed into the desert in a fireball...so perhaps a little extra money could have been put to good use.

Finally.

[Walterk]

This deserves to succeed. Slow travel along long distances is a pain in the butt. If they can make it consume about 3/4th of the fuel that Concorde needed, that it'll probably already make a profit.

The techonology is already there, they just need to optimise it. This is a great collaboration of the two frontiers of technology, Europe and Japan.

This will probably get modded down by those American Boeing supporters, who have made nothing but new versions of 40 year old aircraft.

Two reasons:

[mekkab]

1) Concorde was an engineering marvel that never got stepped up with the times. Japan and France are betting they can make a much more efficient engine that would save on fuel consumption.

2) Large bodies of water. You can't fly the concord at full speed over the continental united states (pretty much squashing SST in America). But you can do it over the vastness of the pacific. If you shorten that route, business men and women will beat a path to your door, check book in hand. So would international parcel carriers.

Price to fly

[NelsonM]

The United States definitely isn't ready for something like this. With so many airlines going bankrupt because of a super competitive market and absurd fuel costs, I don't see this taking off. (Pun fully intended) ;-)

I don't see too many people using this service, unless somehow they can keep the ticket prices reasonable. And even that isn't very likely, considering the plane is strapped to a rocket.

Re:I don't get it.

[onion2k]

Calling Concorde a fiscal failure is a little deceptive. Sure, the British and French government's never got their investment back from British Airways and Air France, but they never wanted it back. European government often backs extremely expensive development of aviation projects without requiring the money is paid back. It annoys Boeing and Lockheed no end. But they do it to keep jobs and confidence going in the industry.

And besides, it's cool.

Sometimes you have to look beyond simply making a profit.

Re:there's a need for it

[matt4077]

well, developing it in japan doesn't mean that they are planning to use it (only) there. There is certainly a market for this between all three major economic areas: North America, Europe, Asia. The Japanese will certainly be happy to sell it.

Besides, did they really make you eat 2 movies? Does it hurt?

Very curious.

[Ancient_Hacker]

One might suspect the real purpose is more along the lines of keeping the aircraft industry ticking over at some minor level. There have been billions already spent on supersonic wind-tunnel tests. It's extremely unlikely any new design will be found that's even 10% more efficient than those already developed. And as long as oil is at the current prices, there's no chance the plane would be able to pay for itself, even at $15,000 a seat.

What?

[BlackCobra43]

You praise this "new" Concorde for basically being a new, slightly improved version of the old one and then bash Boieng for doing pretty much the same thing with its own models. Come on, the Concorde is 40 years old too y'know

THIS DOES NOT COMPUTE

Re:This is the next step

[Bastian]

I'm curious why you use the term 'necessary.'

The Concorde, having come into existence decades before the explosion of the Internet and stuff like videoconferencing, was rolled out at a time when business and government folks (the only ones for whom it could ever be anything but a luxury) had a much greater need for a supersonic jetliner, and yet only sixteen were ever built. The entire project would almost certainly have been a complete and dismal failure had there not been massive subsidies from the French and British governments keeping the thing in the air.

There in the end, the Concorde was having a hard time filling seats - yes, the crash in 2000 and Sep. 11 played into this, but my guess is that the demand was already dropping, and these events just exacerbated the situation.

This Japanese supersonic jetliner is about as necessary as the Bugati Veyron or a jet turbine powered motorcycle.

Better wake up, America

[Old VMS Junkie]

Yet another example of the rest of the world surpassing the US in a key engineering endeavor. We reward all the wrong things in America (think about reality TV, political correctness, the religous right, and so on) and then wonder why the rest of the world is churning out better engineers and scientists and why our technical jobs are being off-shored.

Even companies we think of as technology leaders may not be anymore. This quote:

A breakthrough in supersonic flight could help Japan leapfrog ahead in the aerospace field. The country, which does much of parts manufacturing for U.S.-based Boeing Co...

says just as much about what's going on as anything else in the article.

And, yes, I'm an American engineer.

Re:Don't kill the Kangaroo(s)

[twiddlingbits]

You would rather they tested it over a populated area? It's the closest land area to Japan where they could test. Tests over the ocean might result in a loss of the vehicle, so they go to the Outback where they have lots of land with few people. Makes perfect sense.

Old Concept

[isa-kuruption]

This concept, the piggy-backed plane, is basically the original concept for launching the space shuttle. The idea was to launch the space shuttle aboard a high altitude, re-usable airplane (rocket powered). Once at a specific altitude, the space shuttle would detach and use it's own power to continue into space.

Congress killed it because of money problems.

Over 25 years later, we see the Japanese using the same technology as a commercial airliner. There is nothing really new here, only the implementation has changed.

Nonetheless, it's a good idea.

Why?

[f97tosc]

Some sort of high altitude Concorde replacement is necessary

The original concorde had a failed business model (granted, noise regulation around some American airports didn't help).

What has fundamentally changed since then, that is likely to make this more successful? I think on the contrary when new "regular" flights such as 787 (or the new Airbus) are somewhat faster and have much better communications (internet, etc), it will make the value proposition for a super-fast, super-expensive flight even more questionable.

Tor

Re:I don't get it.

[Malc]

Yeah, and the likes of Boeing and Lockheed get the equivalent of subsidies from the US government. There's no outside competition in their market (defense industry), which annoys Airbus no end ;)

Re:Looks like ...

[magarity]

So the XF-103 was a Mach-3 project in 1956-7, a dozen years after the invention of the jet engine. It's now 2005 and there's just one country even trying to make a supersonic passenger aircraft. Sad, sad, sad.

Re:Not really very impressive.

[Have Blue]

The difference is, this one will be *cheaper*. Your car goes about as fast as one made in the 1960s too, but nobody would argue auto technology has stagnated since then.

Re:This is the next step

[dtmos]

You obviously do not fly across the Pacific very often. Realizing that you're flying at 550 mph when technology to fly at 1400 mph was introduced in the 1970s becomes really excruciating after about 10 hours into the flight.

To the point that you'd pay a significant surcharge to already be at your destination, asleep in your hotel room.

The high fuel consumption difficulty mentioned in TFA is what kept Concorde off of the Pacific routes; if that is resolved as the Japanese intend, I see a nice market for this plane.

Re:Yeah, but is it robot controlled?

[DigitalRaptor]

Speaking of "robot controlled", I find it amazing that jets like the 747 don't have a way to detect a loss of cabin pressure and go to a lower altitude.

The plane that crashed in Greece flew on autopilot until it ran out of gas.

Had the autopilot detected the loss of cabin pressure and immediately dropped to the lowest safe altitude (10,000 if there aren't any mountains to run into, for instance), the pilots would have regained consciousness and 150+ people wouldn't have died (not to mention the loss of a very expensive piece of equipment).

Re:Old Concept

[ausoleil]

Not exactly what happened. Close, but it was never the design of the shuttle that was so costly as it was the lack of political will on the part of the Niuxon administration, who had no real clue as to how to proceed once Apollo was winding down.

According to Wikipedia:

However, in reality, NASA found itself with a rapidly plunging budget. Rather than trying to adapt their long-term future to their dire financial situation, they attempted to save as many of the individual projects as possible. The mission to Mars was rapidly dismissed, but the Space Station and Shuttle conserved. Eventually only one of them could be saved, so it stood to reason that a low-cost Shuttle system would be the better option, because without it a large station would never be affordable.

A number of designs were proposed, but many of them were complex and varied widely in their systems. An attempt to re-simplify was made in the form of the "DC-3" by one of the few people left in NASA with the political importance to accomplish it, Maxime Faget, who had designed the Mercury capsule, among other vehicles. The DC-3 was a small craft with a 20,000-pound (9 tonne) (or less) payload, a four-man capacity, and limited maneuverability. At a minimum, the DC-3 provided a baseline "workable" (but not significantly advanced) system by which other systems could be compared for price/performance compromises.

The defining moment for NASA was when they, in desperation to see their only remaining project saved, went to the Air Force for its blessing. NASA asked that the USAF place all of their future launches on the Shuttle instead of their current expendable launchers (like the Titan II), in return for which they would no longer have to continue spending money upgrading those designs -- the Shuttle would provide more than enough capability.

The Air Force reluctantly agreed, but only after demanding a large increase in capability to allow for launching their projected spy satellites (mirrors are heavy).

The original space shuttle was just that -- a shuttlecraft not designed to carry heavy cargo into orbit.

At the end of the Apollo era, the politicians had collectively decided to give in to the "spend the money on earth" socialist types and were cutting the budget of a program that had succeeded both politically and technically. NASA had plans to build space stations, go to Mars and also to develop new vehicles to ferry cargo and another for crew. The "DC-3" space shuttle was that.

Instead, to preserve any of it's plans, NASA had to fold in the triumvirate of new spacecraft into one, and that to accomodate the Air Force.

This, in turn, led to the "compromise" design that has plagued the Shuttle since it's inception. fourteen people have died as a result of these compromises, which are namely:

1. Solid rocket boosters. The SS is the only man-rated vehicle of any nation to use SRB's as a primary boost source.

2. Side-carried "payload" -- namely the Shuttle itself. The original DC-3 design was a top-payload vehicle much like every other manned spaceraft. However, the size of the compromiwe vehicle would have required a booster larger than the Saturn V in order to achieve LEO. This, obviously was not enable, so the side-payload "piggyback" design was created using engines on the payload itself as a source of thrust for the vehicle.

Thus, we have what we have, and it is a flying compromise built by the lwest bidder by a company no longer in business for itself (Boeing acquired North American Rockwell.)

Time for a new shuttle, and one that goes back to the original vision.

Re:Yeah, but is it robot controlled?

[Richard_at_work]

You yourself mention the reason why this doesnt happen - terrain. An autopilot cannot conduct avoidance measures for other aircraft or terrain, so theres little point in having an auto descend capability, because if it happens over, say, Heathrow then you have a huge possibility of collisions with other aircraft, especially if one of them is going to make sudden, unexpected movements like dive 25,000 feet.

What you need to be asking is why didnt the cockpit oxygen systems work? You have 15 - 30 seconds to put an oxygen mask on at 35,000ft so how was it that neither Pilot or Flight Officer managed to get their (independant) mask on and descend the aircraft?

I would support this ...

[Muad'Dave]

... if they incorporated research into sonic boom supression/elimination like this [nasa.gov], or this [nasa.gov].

I think finding a way to supress the sonic boom so that it can fly over any country is critical to the success of any future supersonic plane.

Re:Looks like ...

[TheRaven64]

Flying faster than sound is not that hard. Flying faster than sound in something big enough to carry 300 passengers is harder. Economically flying faster than sound in something big enough to carry 300 passengers is a lot harder.

Re:This is the next step

[Tyler Eaves]

Huh?

I don't think I can think of a *single* incident in which an aircraft has broken up during supersonic flight, excepting the early, fatally flawed attempts in the 1940s. There is counter-evidence as well. The SR-71s would sometimes stall an engine at Mach 3, resulting in a hard yaw to the side. That never broke the wings off any of 'em. Plane crashes basically happen only during takeoff and landing. Cruise flight is *incredibly* safe. You're up above the birds, the majority of the weather, etc. Besides that, losing your wings or half of the fuselage at 500mph is no LESS fatal than at 1500.

Re:Why?

[Richard_at_work]

Concorde didnt have a failed business model, it was actually making money on each flight once British Airways took over Concorde operations totally. What it did have was huge development costs, mainly because in the end only 14 aircraft were sold. If all the options were exercised by the airlines, Concorde would have sold over 600 airframes and been very successful but unfortunately it turned out that it couldnt fly supersonic over land and the most profitable route for Concorde was already taken by Air France and British Airways.

I dont understand your comment about the 787 or A350 being 'faster', as they are both subsonic. There will always be a market for supersonic flights, whether its serviced by a major airline or a private aircraft.

Re:I don't get it.

[ifwm]

"Calling Concorde a fiscal failure is a little deceptive" Didn't make money. Nothing deceptive there. "Sometimes you have to look beyond simply making a profit." Um, isn't making a profit what "fiscal" success is? Did you bother to look it up before you posted? Yes it's cool, yes it's a great research endeavor, but is WAS a fiscal failure, no way around that.

Re:This is the next step

[Tyler Eaves]

Supersonic flight means that a miniscule problem can sometimes cause the whole damned thing to disintegrate in mid-air into scrap metal.

That's simply bullshit. There is NOTHING magical about being supersonic. In fact, drag (and thus stress on the airframe) actually dips DOWN quite a bit just through the sound barrier. This is why you see few if any planes that just barely break mach 1. If it has enough thrust to go supersonic at all, it'll get to at least mach 1.7 or so. Mach 2 is NOT rocket science. This is not the shuttle re-entering at Mach 30.

Re:I don't get it.

[Jherek Carnelian]

Yeah, and the likes of Boeing and Lockheed get the equivalent of subsidies from the US government. There's no outside competition in their market (defense industry), which annoys Airbus no end

Don't be silly. There are PLENTY of foreign companies that sell to the US DoD. They usually have a presence in the American commercial market, but they do not need to be American companies.

For example, see British-based Rolls Royce - the largest customer for their defense division is now the pentagon:

http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=417 5069&CFID=59782316 [economist.com]

Re:Yeah, but is it robot controlled?

[gstoddart]

Never heard of RADAR or TCAS, have you? I honestly can not think of one modern airline-type aircraft in existance without TCAS.

Oh no, I've heard of them.

But since we all know the airline industry makes such major changes with a cost-benefit analysis, they're going to do the math on how many planes are likely to have at-altitude decompression, how many people will die, and work out the total cost of the upgrades.

If the upgrades cost more than the insurance payout, no changes will get made. That's a simple fact about the aviation industry.

Sure, you could upgrade all aircraft so that their autopilot can do it's own collision detection, folow terrains, respond to decompressions safely and get you to a safe altitude, and probably quite a few other things. The simple solution of 'auto-pilot detects depressurization and descends' becomes complex in the face of all of the other stuff. And then it becomes massively expensive and entirely unlikely.

Again, in a risk-averse industry with low margins of profit, they will not pay for the upgrading to the super-deluxe model you describe.

As is often the case, economic realities often trump theoretical technical solutions.

Why I'm having this discussion with someone logged in as an AC, I'll never know.

Re:I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful my ass! Ever heard of EADS? The number one defense contractor in Europe is the parent of Airbus. So tell me, how does Boeing and Lockheed benefit where Airbus doesn't?

Re:I don't get it.

[amabbi]

Airbus was a joint venture of Britain's BAE Systems and EADS-- combined, they are the world's largest defense contractor. Whiners who complain about Boeing and Lockmart's defense contracts as subsidies should well remember that. Besides, before Boeing bought McDonnell-Douglas in the mid 90s, they were a distant second player in the defense market.

Teenagers

[XFilesFMDS1013]

Someone who doesn't like him probably got mod points. And think about it, you're dealing with teenagers here, can you get more petty and vindictive? And just to prove my point, this post will get modded troll.

It's All About Jet-A

[mirio]

I'm an aviation buff and pilot, so naturally I agree with you that supersonic travel for the masses is a desirable goal.

The one constant about flight that you can depend on is that airspeed is inversely proportional to the amount of fuel you burn -- the faster you go, the more fuel you're burning for less increases in speed. This is why airliners almost *NEVER* fly at their maximum cruise speed...they fly at the airspeed that will get them to their destination using the least amount of expensive Jet-A.

Efficiency increases in the development of jet engines has mostly stalled and now the airline manufacturers are focusing on materials to improve efficiency (i.e. the Boeing 7E7 long-range aircraft).

The free market will decide the type of planes people will travel on. This is why Concorde is no longer flying. As beautiful as she was, she was a government project funded by European tax payers developed only for the purpose of showing European ingenuity and technological innovation. I would have loved to have flown in Concorde, but the airplane never recouped the billions spent developing/maintaining her. The project was a net loss -- big time.

Perhaps there is some future in Scramjet/Ramjet engines, but in today's market with high fuel prices it's all about fuel consumption per passenger per mile.