Image source, NASA/Carla Thomas Image caption, The long nose of the X-59 is designed to damped the plane's sonic boom By Michael Dempsey Technology Reporter Published 3 hours ago There's a weird and wonderful jet flying over the US. It has the nose of anteater, parts cannibalised from other planes and a cockpit so far back the pilot depends on a camera to see where he's going. This contraption, the X-59, might just be the future of air travel. The X-59's owes its eccentric design to the problem of sonic booms. The shockwave created by a jet breaking the sound barrier restricted Concorde to flights over the sea and barred it from lucrative routes across the US. Now Nasa is working around that problem using the X-59's elongated snout to flatten supersonic booms into tolerable bumps in the background. On top of its bizarre appearance the X-59 boasts a remarkable lineage. It's the latest in a series of experimental Nasa aircraft dating back to 1947 and the first plane to break the sound barrier, the Bell X-1. Peter Coen, a 43-year Nasa veteran who manages the programme, explains the thinking behind 80 years of X-planes. "Our approach is to pick small goals we aim to prove with flight data and we construct an airframe for that one task." The X-plane philosophy is to "minimise goals, the more goals you have the more expensive it gets." For the X-59 it's about suppressing sonic booms on a budget and nothing else. In the case of the X-1, flown through the sound barrier in 1947 by the legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager, Nasa knew a .50 calibre bullet travelled faster than the speed of sound. So the stumpy little aircraft was shaped like a bullet with wings added. A mere 20 years later the X-15 rocket plane, a cylinder with tiny wings dropped from a B-52 bomber, flew to 6.7 times the speed of sound (4,520 mph) and the edge of space, paving the way for heat-resistant materials vital to the Space Shuttle. Image source, Museum of Flight/Corbis via Getty Images Image caption, In 1947 the Bell X-1 was the first plane to break the sound barrier Nasa is flying the X-59 in conjunction with community surveys to assess what people think when a supersonic boom is bent by the planes stretched nose and hushed up. "We want to figure out what level of boom is acceptable to people on a regular basis," says Coen, who reckons his machine will sound "like a car door being closed across the street" when it flies past Mach 1, around 660mph at airline cruising altitude. With its cockpit and ejector seat taken from a T-38 training jet, its landing gear from an F-16 fighter and engine courtesy of the F-18 this jigsaw of an aircraft was assembled by Lockheed Martin for Nasa. A camera feeding a screen in front of the pilot relies on instantaneous computer processing to get round the lack of forward vision. It...
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