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Aviation History
1976
1976 - 0086.PDF
Flifht International Supplement, w/e 17 January 1976 •1 Contents Supersonic Waypoints Will it pay? Engineering masterpiece Concorde anatomy Supersonic pollution Seventy tonnes of thrust Shockwave management Supersonic captain Concorde checklist What's it like? upersonic Wr/points s NEARLY 30 YEARS HAVE elapsed from the first level flight faster than sound to the first supersonic passenger service. This gap is longer than was predicted when US Air Force test pilot Major Charles Yeager took his rocket- propelled Bell XS-1 to just over Mach 1 in October 1947. Within 10 years, American aircraft de signers were forecasting that a supersonic airliner would be in passenger service by 1965. One manufacturer was even convinced that the correct supersonic speed was Mach 3 and that this would be achieved in airline service be fore the end of the 'sixties. What fantasies they now appear, all those learned papers, wind- tunnel models and brochures. There was more work to be done than could be foreseen. In fact, the perfection of passenger super- sonics will have taken longer than from the biplane fighters of World War I to the Bell XS-1. At Gottingen in 1933, the German scientist Buseman had examined in a Mach 1-5 wind tunnel the compressibility drag rise which occurs as the speed of sound, is approached. For some years it had been widely thought that this would present a perma nent barrier to practical flight faster than sound. German scien tists showed how the drag rise A special supplement to Flight International to mark the inauguration by Britain and France of the world's first supersonic passenger services. A plain man's guide to Europe's greatest technical and transport achievement. Supersonic Man's Twelve-hour World From the evolution of homo sapiens until about 1840 the distance a man could travel in his working day —say 12 hours—was about 75 miles. By the early nineteenth century man's twelve-hour world became 500 miles. Then technology produced the aeroplane. By 1958 a man could travel 7,000 miles in his working hours. In 1976, thanks to Concorde, man's twelve-hour world will be the world itself. Editor J. M. Ramsden Assistant editor Stephen Broadbent Design Peter Slocombe © Copyright Flight International 1976 Published by IPC Transport Press Dorset House, Stamford Street, London SE1 9LU sum , • St ••'' S1 #SSW*MP
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