JOSH: NASA is working to design the Airliner of the future...
Faster, with less noise, and less impact on the environment.
Get ready for take off... Next on Real World.
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JOSH: Not all of NASA's best designs are intended for space.
Many of the most important developments in its history
have to do with aircraft that travel within earth's
atmosphere.
NASA has always been one of the foremost authorities in
developing aircraft... you know like airplanes,
and helicopters...
In fact the world as we know it, the ability to fly from one
place to another, to ship our packages over night,
would not exist, without all the work that NASA has done...
And that work continues today.
One project has NASA working on ways to make supersonic
airplanes - planes that fly faster than the speed of sound
- safe, quiet and common for every day air travel.
PETER COEN: We don't build airplanes, but we're trying to
put the technology and the tools in place, where someone,
if the market was right, could design and construct a super
sonic aircraft that would be effective
from an economic standpoint.
JOSH: Peter Coen is the Supersonics Project
Principal Investigator for NASA's
Fundamental Aeronautics Program.
PETER: So we really are going after some of these key
challenges such as the sonic boom. We'd like to get to the
point where we would lower the boom so that the airplane could
fly over land without creating a loud or annoying disturbance
on the ground that people would hear.
JOSH: That was a problem with the Concorde, the last
commercial airliner that flew at supersonic speeds.
It was fast but created a loud sonic boom.
The Concorde flew more than twice the speed of sound,
topping out at Mach 2.2.
That's 2330 kilometers per hour.
By comparison, the Boeing 747 tops out at mach .92,
or 988 kilometers per hour, the airbus A380 reaches top speeds
of mach .96 or 1020 kilometers per hour.
But the noise and the cost made the Concorde, and supersonic
commercial flight less than practical.
Now here's the really cool part... NASA is looking way
outside the box, trying to pull as many ideas as possible
together to make this project a reality.
They are even looking to school kids like you.
EDRIC SAN MIGUEL: My design has a key thing to minimize the
sonic boom is to have this extended nose which will
reshape the sound wave generated by an aircraft that
travel at speeds exceeding the speeds of sound.
JOSH: This is Edric San Miguel. He's a high school student,
and the winner of the NASA Fundamental Aeronautics Student
Competition for 2008-2009 - High School Division.
EDRIC: Another thing in my design is the materials will be
lightweight and fuel efficient, unlike the Concorde.
The Concorde, it demonstrated a lot of difficulties with fuel
efficiency. In addition to the extended nose, what I found in
my research is an inverted v-tail shape, because it also
helps reshape this sound wave.
So instead of having that sharp sound wave, that's generated by
aircraft, it's going to be more like a smooth curve.
So that will minimize the sonic boom.
JOSH: As a result of his innovative ideas, he's spending
the summer at NASA, learning what it takes to be an
aeronautics engineer for the agency.
EDRIC: The experience here at NASA is pretty phenomenal.
You get a lot of hands on things that you can work on.
And it gives you an idea of what your future might be like
if you continue the path you are headed to.
PETER: Our goal is to inspire young people to think, and get
out there and do a little research and try to understand
a problem, and then think about how would you create a solution
to that problem. So that was the kind of exciting thing
about the high school competition and particularly
Edric's submission is that it was obvious he did his
homework, and read a lot about the problem, and then took a
whole bunch of ideas and put them together into a solution
that, you know, has potential.
The fact that he thought about it, synthesized a unique
concept and then wrote about it in a very clear, expressive
manner, resulted him being a winner.
JOSH: And Edric's work is just one of many NASA programs that
student interns get to work on.
Elsewhere at Langley, students are working in the transonic
Dynamic wind tunnel, trying to minimize flutter in aircrafts.
Other students are using computer models to determine
the environmental impact of scramjets, super-fast planes
that will fly perhaps as fast as 24 times the speed of sound.
If Edric continues in engineering, he could one day,
help to develop a better way to make supersonic flight
a reality. And that could cut flight time in half, or more.
But the sonic boom created by planes flying faster than the
speed of sound needs to be reduced or eliminated.
PETER: When an airplane is flying faster than sound,
it's outracing its own noise, it's own pressure disturbance.
So what happens is, after the airplane has passed overhead,
the entire pressure disturbance created by the airplane arrives
at the ground instantaneously as two very loud bangs.
It's the instantaneousness of that sound that creates the
real disturbance. It's an audio disturbance primarily.
But you can actually feel the pressure change on your body.
JOSH: But now researchers are looking to the future to planes
that will perform better than supersonic planes of the past
PETER: Near the airplane there are lots of these pressure
changes due to the nose of the airplane, the wings the cockpit
canopy, the engine, the cells.
As that boom travels from the airplane, it travels out like a
sound wave, like ripples in a pond, and begins to head
towards the ground. All those little waves begin to merge
together into two large waves. So that's why the sonic boom is
a large bang bang on the ground.
To control the sonic boom, you have to keep all those little
disturbances from merging together. So you design the
fuselage and the wings of the airplane such that those shock
wave are small and they're kind of evenly spaced down the
length of the airplane.
The state of the technology at the current time, favors a
smaller aircraft, smaller than the Concorde, which could
reintroduce supersonic flight
as a viable means of transportation.
NASA's vision is further out, say 20 years from now,
where we could have a small supersonic airliner, which
could be used on long range routes, relatively efficiently
and without environmental impact.
JOSH: And with students like Edric... and you, thinking
about this technology, the innovation will keep on coming.
You can learn more about supersonic flight and all NASA
aeronautics technology by surfing over to
www.NASA.gov/topics /aeronautics.
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