Commercial Air Travel at Mach 1.7

I have always wanted to teleport from where I am today to the next conference that I am supposed to attend, avoiding all the custom checks, long hours of wait at the airport, and jet lag, unfortunately, time travel is not yet possible, and let’s leave it to the physicists to fight over the controversy that time could be the fourth dimension beyond the three dimensions i.e., height, length, and width.

We are traveling time, or else I wouldn’t have had so many greys, or I would look as young as I was 15 years back. The kind of time travel that we expect is like the one we have seen in movies, where you sit in a vehicle, supposedly a time machine and you’re teleported to 2060 or the 1840s just like in “Star Trek”, “Doctor Who” and “Back to the Future”. Several theories support time travel some of them being the black holes, wormholes, string theory, and Einstein’s theory of special relativity (time is relative to an observer).

Fastest Airliner – The Overture

Imagine if you could travel from New York to London in just 3.5 hours which would be half the time it takes to reach the destination, it wouldn’t be time travel, but instead, the airplane could be flying at twice the speed at which sound travels. Boom Supersonic, a start-up, plans on rehabilitating the Concorde with the latest design, renaming it the Overture, promising to touch the three S’s that is speed, safety, and sustainability with speed being the center of their airplane design. Overture will be designed to fly at a speed of Mach 1.7, capable of carrying 65+ passengers to 600+ routes with net zero emissions making it a sustainable choice for travel, especially for the Gen Z’s whose decision-making is largely dependent on sustainability. Its gull wings will be designed to reduce supersonic noises and engine stress and its contoured fuselage is expected to reduce parasitic drag.

Blake Scholl, to make supersonic travel an ordinary, founded Boom Supersonic in 2014. So far, the team of engineers at Boom supersonic has made contributions to about 40 different air and spacecraft, and 30 of their Overture aircraft are already preordered by Virgin Group and Japan Airlines. According to Blake Scholl, “If we can fly twice as fast, the world becomes twice as small, turning far-off lands into familiar neighbors”. Undoubtedly, the Overture is going to be the world’s fastest airliner ever since the Concorde was pulled back due to high maintenance costs and a low number of passengers.

When and Why did the Concorde Retire?

The Concorde retired after being in the market for 27 years, with its first commercial airliner being made on January 21st, 1976. Ever since the crash of Air France Concorde in July 2000, passengers were hesitant to take the Concorde flight and the plane crashed as it ran over a piece of metal which burst the tire and caused the fuel tank to ignite, killing 109 passengers onboard. The high maintenance costs were also another reason for their early retirement, especially with a tight budget due to the low passenger count. Moreover, it was the only flight among the British Airways fleet that needed a flight engineer.

The last Concorde plane to fly has gone on display at the Aerospace Bristol museum in October 2017 and 6 of the service planes are on display at the Manchester airport, the Barbados airport, the Flight Museum near Edinburgh, the Museum of Flight in Seattle, and at the New York's Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. The two novel prototypes of the aircraft, i.e. 001 and 002 are on display at the French Museum of Air and the Yeovilton Fleet Air Arm Museum.

Cadence Fidelity CFD for Airplane Design and Development

With advanced CFD technologies available in the market, testing the Overture design models in extreme environmental conditions is substantial. Our Cadence’s Fidelity CFD solutions enable fully automated, and flexible workflow for virtual aerospace design and development with tools such as:

• Dedicated fast solvers for incompressible and compressible fluids, from subsonic to hypersonic flow regimes
• A complete end-to-end solution for rotating equipment, including compressors, turbines, fans, propellers, etc.
• A whole suite of aero- and vibroacoustic tools for noise source identification and propagation. 
• Two-way fluid-structure interaction (FSI) coupling or modal approach for faster convergence.
• High-order solutions for faster analysis with minimum assumptions.

Further, these solutions can be rolled out on-premises, on-demand via dedicated HPC cloud computing resources such as the Cadence Oncloud platform, or using a powerful combination of both.

Now how different the new Overture airplane will be, is yet to be witnessed. Will the Overture face similar consequences as those of the Concorde or are there any innovative strategies to attract prospective passengers and investors to make this dream of flying at Mach 1.7 possible? All these questions remain unanswered. But it is evident that the Boom Supersonic team is putting in efforts to show that they are a serious team of industry players and a chalet at the Farnborough International Airshow was the best opportunity to showcase their brand presence and their work!