NASA hopes to speed return to commercial supersonic travel

“Right now in the United States, there’s a prohibition about flying commercially supersonic over land because of the sonic boom,” said Ed Waggoner, director of NASA’s integrated aviation systems program, at a forum on aviation innovation at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. “We believe we’ve got design guidelines that we can change that obnoxious sonic boom. It’s quite different than what you think about as a sonic boom… It will sound like distant thunder on a summer night. If you’re not thinking about it, you won’t hear it.”

He said NASA and Lockheed Martin will design, build, and test an aircraft known as the X–59. It will be 100 feet long, have a 30-foot wing span, and fly at Mach 1.4 at 55,000 feet. Designed for a single pilot flying on instruments, the X–59 will use components from existing aircraft to reduce its cost: an F–18 engine, a T–38 canopy and cockpit, and F–16 landing gear.

“We’re well into this project,” Waggoner said. “We’ve gone through conceptual and we’re in the final design and build phase leading up to testing phase.” He said NASA is committed to conducting a first flight in 2022, but he believes it may be as early as 2021. Community response testing will last 2.5 years, he said.

“We’ve evaluated these technologies in wind tunnels and used noise simulators,” Waggoner said. “Now it’s time to actually build an aircraft that’s designed to not generate an obnoxious boom and evaluate that and flying it over communities all over the U.S. to see what that’s like.”