SST: Dynamic Stability & Control Studies of 1960s Supersonic Transports NASA Langley Research Center (Patreon)

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Dynamic Stability and Control Studies of Supersonic Transport Configurations of the 1960s Using the Free Flight Model Technique

Silent.

Originally a public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_transport

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

A supersonic transport (SST) is a civilian supersonic aircraft designed to transport passengers at speeds greater than the speed of sound. To date, the only SSTs to see regular service have been Concorde and the Tupolev Tu-144. The last passenger flight of the Tu-144 was in June 1978 and it was last flown in 1999 by NASA. Concorde's last commercial flight was in October 2003, with a November 26, 2003 ferry flight being its last airborne operation. Following the permanent cessation of flying by Concorde, there are no remaining SSTs in commercial service. Several companies have each proposed a supersonic business jet, which may bring supersonic transport back again.

Supersonic airliners have been the objects of numerous recent and ongoing design studies. Drawbacks and design challenges are excessive noise generation (at takeoff and due to sonic booms during flight), high development costs, expensive construction materials, high fuel consumption, extremely high emissions, and an increased cost per seat over subsonic airliners. Despite these challenges, Concorde was claimed to operate profitably, although that was due to write off of all development and construction costs plus the willingness of passengers to pay high fares.

In 2016, NASA announced it had signed a contract for the design of a modern low-noise SST prototype. The designing team is led by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics...

In the early 1960s, various executives of US aerospace companies were telling the US public and Congress that there were no technical reasons an SST could not be produced. In April 1960, Burt C Monesmith, a vice president with Lockheed, stated to various magazines that an SST constructed of steel weighing 250,000 pounds (110,000 kg) could be developed for $160 million and in production lots of 200 or more sold for around $9 million. But it was the Anglo-French development of the Concorde that set off panic in the US industry, where it was thought that Concorde would soon replace all other long range designs, especially after Pan Am took out purchase options on the Concorde. Congress was soon funding an SST design effort, selecting the existing Lockheed L-2000 and Boeing 2707 designs, to produce an even more advanced, larger, faster and longer ranged design. The Boeing 2707 design was eventually selected for continued work, with design goals of ferrying around 300 passengers and having a cruising speed near to Mach 3. The Soviet Union set out to produce its own design, the Tu-144, which the western press nicknamed the "Concordski."

The SST was seen as particularly offensive due to its sonic boom and the potential for its engine exhaust to damage the ozone layer. Both problems impacted the thinking of lawmakers, and eventually Congress dropped funding for the US SST program in March 1971, and all overland commercial supersonic flight was banned over the US. Presidential advisor Russell Train warned that a fleet of 500 SSTs flying at 65,000 ft (20 km) for a period of years could raise stratospheric water content by as much as 50% to 100%. According to Train, this could lead to greater ground-level heat and hamper the formation of ozone. In relation to stratospheric water and its potential to increase ground temperatures, although not mentioning Concorde as the source of the "recent decline in water vapor is unknown", in 2010 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted that Stratospheric Water Vapor levels in the 1980s and 1990s were higher than that in the 2000s, by approximately 10%, with Susan Solomon of NOAA calculating that it is this change which is responsible for the slow down in the rise in surface temperatures from global warming by about 25 percent when compared to the warming rate in the 1990s. Russell Train's other, water-ozone concern, was however countered by Fred Singer in a letter to the journal Nature in 1971, "which upset those who claimed that supersonic transports might seriously affect stratospheric ozone"...