Asked by: Anonymous
As an aircraft moves through the air, it sets up waves of compressed air – ‘pressure waves’ – around its fuselage, like the bow wave of a boat. At the speed of sound, the aircraft is traveling so fast that the waves of compression merge into a shock wave, producing a change in air pressure so rapid that it sounds like an explosion.
This ‘sonic boom’ has always been the bane of commercial supersonic aircraft design: Concorde was forced to remain subsonic except over the open sea, significantly reducing its average speed, and thus its commercial advantage.
In principle, it’s possible to reduce the build-up of the pressure waves through careful design of wings and fuselage. Engineers at Lockheed in California have been working on a 12-passenger aircraft called the Quiet Supersonic Transport (above) whose sleek gull-wing and rear-engined design is aimed at reducing the noise of the sonic boom tenfold.
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