NASA is testing a plane to connect London to New York in 3 hours

NASA, the US National Aerospace Agency, has announced that it has completed the first tests of the X-59 QueSST, a quiet supersonic jet nicknamed “the son of Concorde”, the well-known aircraft retired from service in 2003. To be precise, NASA conducted tests with a small-scale model inside the “wind tunnel”, built by teams from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. A preliminary experiment before arriving at the final construction of the life-size supersonic jet. The project is managed by the US Aerospace Agency and California’s Skunk Works division Lockheed Martin.

Once completed, the X-59 QueSST will be able to fly at supersonic speeds. In the case of a commercial trip, a London – New York jet flight should only take three hours. Moreover, unlike the Concorde, the new device under construction would not cause any sonic boom. An important turning point, due to a series of technical attentions, such as the engine mounted in the upper part of the vehicle, thus manages to avoid sudden blows despite navigating at Mach 1.4, the equivalent of 1,074 miles per hour. ‘time. Added to this is the nose, approximately 9 meters long, specially designed to reduce the shock waves triggered by the movement of air particles when an aircraft is moving faster than the speed of sound, which is 343 meters per second. Regarding the overall dimensions, NASA has announced that the X-59 will be approximately 29 meters long and have a wingspan of nearly 9 meters.

The main objective of the new aircraft is the elimination of the sonic boom, a kind of very powerful roar comparable to thunder or an explosion. It happens when shock waves from an object traveling faster than sound come together before they reach the ground. Sonic booms generate huge amounts of sound energy, around 110 decibels, very uncomfortable from a sonic point of view. Concorde was used to the phenomenon, so much so that its use was limited to overflights of the Atlantic.

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The many tests carried out with the reduced model of the X-59 are a good omen. “This is an opportunity for the team to get data on the low sound levels produced in the tunnel,” said Clayton Meyers, deputy project manager for NASA’s Commercial Supersonic Technology (CST) project.