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@@rollon1181 Yes, I agree with that but the problem with a supersonic plane is the speed because Energy is proportional to the velocity squared. So, I think they are not aiming for reducing fuel consumption with the idea, but they are reducing the noise problem. The idea of using overlapping waves is smart because it should be intuitive, yet it is not. (for engineers at least).
@@Eric-zz5ij No, the lift created by each pair of wings will be relatively similar to one slightly larger wing, so it will actually require a lot more mass. The other problem is that whatever connects the two will need to be able to absorb much of a sonic boom every time it flies. So even more weight meaning more fuel.
Interestingly enough the current boarding process could be much faster and is actually potentially slower then just boarding the plane in a random order. However no airline uses the most efficient boarding method simply because people will never all listen and form a line in correct order (someone will board out of order massively slowing the process down). It would also mean that first class would board at the same time as business class defeating the point of the higher price ticket.
I remember someone saying once that the majority of people who flew on Concorde would have had no idea how much their tickets would have cost, because they were wealthy enough to have personal assistants to book their flights and accountants to worry about the price...
That’s quite true… Concorde was losing a horrendous amount of money in the seventies and early eighties. I think there was no Concorde premium… tickets cost the same as First Class. So BA (and presumably Air France) polled her passengers as to how much their tickets cost. Most of them had no idea and guessed at a price that was far more than the actual cost of a ticket. So prices went up to match expectations and she became profitable.
@@genocosta7240 "Worked on" is pretty vague and considering a project like that probably involved at least a thousand probably multiple thousands of people in one way or another it's really not that surprising. Remember this was before CAD existed and entire drafting rooms full of people were needed to do what today could be done by a handful of engineers.
When I was a kid, my school was near an airport. Whenever a plane took off it rattled the windows of the classroom and all we could hear was the roar of the engine. That all stopped right when the Concord went out of service. Now I finally know why this stopped happening! Thanks Ted-Ed! 😁
@@sanjaimj I've watch them they're really good at animations. But the thing with Ted ed is that they use new art style every other video. Kurgesagt hsve their art style which they consistently use.
I perfectly understand people's frustration with sonic booms and why planes were regulated to stop causing them. I grew up with my grandparents. They owned a farm near an airport. Farm was very close to it so you could see every plane landing and taking off. Quite commonly military jets were taking off from there as well for some reason. And Jesus Christ.... you could see the shockwave when they take off. The sound is extremely loud, all windows vibrate like crazy. Volume is like 1AM in a club. We didn't live on that farm, only were coming in to do farming. But if I'd live and sleep there I'd go crazy.
I grew up a few miles from the airport. There were entire communities moved because of the noise of the airport, and damaging homes. This was not even supersonic stuff. They moved neighborhoods, and changed flight paths, for general aviation, alone. They built a newer bigger runway for the new bigger planes, and tore down another few communities to achieve that. I'm going to leave out military planes, from this topic, because those are another level of loud. I hear the afterburners quite often. Growing up, I heard about lawsuits and legal problems from planes damaging homes. Over time, It seems they would rather buy out communities than to pay on lawsuits. Thankfully, they changed the routes above me, also. Strangely, another factor is that the city owns the airport, in the county land. You can only imagine what kind of dynamics that creates,. ( county neighborhoods suing city airport ) I grew up not from from cars, trains and planes, all times of the day, and they just become normal. At some point, you just don't really hear them anymore because your brain just blocks it out. There are times when you have to stop a conversation waiting on an airplane to pass. It just becomes background noise, and it is very rare to lose sleep over it. There is a golf course, near the airport. One of the attractive features is that you can hear, see, and feel a huge wave of swirling wake turbulence coming down the fairways. It is horrifying if you dont know what it actually is. The golf ball swirls, the trees shake, the noise is like demons coming from who knows where. Good times.. I actually recommend it.
One key element neatly left out is that aircraft can go to higher altitueds where air resistant is sufficiently low, yet dense enough to provide oxigen to the engines while significantly reducing air drag. This has been known for decades, but the resulting economies would be of such a scale that airlines would not be able to justify the already inflated prices.
yeah but then you become severely mach-limited. Speed of sound decreases with altitude, so if you go to high, you won't be able to stay in the air at Vmo
Another problem with Concorde was they had to have certain requirements for runways as well as taking of and landing could not be done with aircrafts in a certain radius of the airport. It wasn't just the cost of the aircraft itself but also the runways and other complications it caused with other aircrafts making Concorde unsuitable for airports unless requirements were met. I grew up on the funny story of my dad learning to fly a light aircraft and that a Concorde aircraft was made to wait until he landed.
I’d heard was one of the reasons that Concorde wasn’t given more US airports was simple jealousy. The US airline industry had nothing comparable and the C rubbed their noses in it. So they amplified the complaints about it to stymie the project long term.
The drag coefficient increases dramatically as you approach the speed of sound, then trails off as it passes Mach 1, but supersonic flight isn't viable for commercial flights because of a) sonic booms rattling homes and b) fuel costs needed to power the engines. So what airlines do is keep the speed at about Mach 0.85-0.9, just before the exponential drag increase kicks in.
Far too often when we all talk about scientific progress we make bold claims of technologies we'll have in 20-50 years...this progress is only achieved through millions of men and women dedicating their life labor to their science, and sometimes the progress is slow or non existent. Still waiting on those fusion reactors everyone said were right around the corner in 1995, I guess we'll just have to settle with micro improvements to cell phone cameras moving forward.
With fusion reactors we've actaully already achieved the ability to have nuclear fusion power. The problem actually is practicality since when we do it we end up in a net negative. So the challenge is creating a large enough net positive to outweigh it. The day we figure it out and can apply this on a large scale would change human history. Which ITER is trying to do.
@@levelfourteen I worked in the fusion nuclear research field for some years, and I can tell you no we don't have the means to utilise fusion power, nor anywhere even near it. ITER is an experimental test reactor, not a power station. We won't have fusion power in 20 years, and possibly not in 200 years. Fusion of deuterium and tritium at 110 million C in a brief burst, is not the same as yielding fusion power. Even if the power extracted can exceed the power needed to run the reactor, that's nothing compared to the other advances necessary to make fusion power viable.
There are 4 forces that act on a plane: thrust, drag, lift, and weight. Planes slow down because of drag. Once power is reduced, drag is greater than thrust and causes the plane to slow down.👍
What you are describing is parasitic drag, but the other factor is induced drag which increases as an aircraft slows down. Get too slow, and induced drag becomes so great that it takes massive amounts of power to keep the aircraft in the air even at very slow speeds.
I had a misconception as a kid that if you were in front of the engines, you wouldn’t be able to hear them until you went below the sound barrier. Of course that isn’t true, the speed of sound is relative to the emitter, so you would hear the engines just as well as if you were stationary.
3:23 there is an error, the sweap does reduce the wingspan, but it really reduces the lift. Planes are normally designed (by my understanding) with a set wingspan (bc of airport restrictions mostly). Then the angle is given. Planes with a high angle are for high speed, subsequently lower angle wings are for lower speed and higher lift. That’s why most piston engines and small planes have either no swept wings or very low angle swept wings. Great video though.
This animation makes the complex summary seem like a children playbook. Very easy to comprehend. I would imagine the idea of an advance civilization isn’t about all about having a higher IQ but the ability to simplify complex information enough, that a huge number of individuals can learn so much in little less time without frying their brains.
In 2000 as an airline employee I rode Concorde for an inter line rate of $500 ! Best money I ever spent ! Came back on a DC-10 - seemed to take forever !
Another reason why Concorde failed is the introduction of Skype in 2003, which make bussiness man (which is the main source of customers for Concorde) stop needing a intercontinent flight to meet their client in short notice. Because every meeting can be done with Internet.
That accident on takeoff from Paris may have played a part, and gave them a good time and excuse to retire it. I suspect it was always economically marginal.
The concord was never a profit driven product. It was a national prestige and political endeavor. If a product is not market driven it will be an impractical, unwanted item
Me, in Britain, who has in-laws in Malaysia 24hrs away on current commercial flights due to flight speed and layover times in Dubai: Please please pleeeaaase bring back research into supersonic flights to Singapore ASAP!!
You seem to have forgotten to mention the fact that the aerodynamic drag induced on a moving object increases with the cube of the object's velocity. Which is one of the main reasons why faster travel times require more fuel, thus driving up the costs.
Another few problems I see: 1. The total time of making a trip also includes the time getting to and from the airport and through security. If getting to the airport and onto the plane is going to take you a total of 2 hours, and perhaps 2 hour to disembark and to get through customs, get your luggage and arrive at your final destination, the difference between a 6 hour flight (10 hours total) and a 2 hour flight (6 hours total) is not really as useful as it seems. Plus, if for the price of sitting in a normal economy-style seat on a supersonic airliner you could fly first class in a layflat bed in a subsonic airliner, and have enough time to take a nap, etc., the benefits are even more reduced. 2. Jet lag. Even if you could teleport somewhere instantly, you are going to have to deal with the problem of jetlag. At least on a 6 to 7 hour flight, you may have a chance at taking a long nap, etc. 2.5 hour flight, not so much. Perhaps on a north to south route within the same time zone or two it would be advantageous to have as short a flight as possible. 3. Range. The Concorde only had a 4500nmi range. Due to the reasons noted in #1, a supersonic aircraft may be most advantageous for time savings on long flights. The A350 XWB Ultra Long Range can fly routes up to 9700nmi. It would be nice to see a supersonic airliner with this type of range.
I think the demand for faster flights is low, because most of the public thinks they are already taking the fastest route. Outside of the concord which was known for the rich, the average person probably thinks their commercial flight is already flying at top speed or close to it…….I definitely did, I just learned a lot from this video.
Another finely produced video. The narration and the accompanying animation made all the information come alive. I'll be watching this over and over again. Thank you!
Another thing that changed was the invention of laptops, smartphones, and the internet. Before that, business people getting to their destination fast was more critical. Now they can work on the plane, have remote meetings etc.
We haven’t been to the moon since the 1970s ! If someone asked me how far in space man has traveled and what we have done, I would have been sure we would have colonies on the moon and Mars by now. If someone told me back in the 70s in 2021, we had not been to the moon in over 40 years, I would have assumed there was a nuclear war that destroyed most of civilization.
My toaster is more high tech than what they apparently flew to the moon.. all the tech we currently have and we can’t get past the van Allen belts, nasa admit they can’t get past them… yet we did it in a tin foil space ship 60 years ago…….. 😂 yeah sure.
It’s not even just supersonic planes. Today’s subsonic airliners fly about 100km/h slower than they did in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, fuel costs didn’t matter, but they simply didn’t have the thrust to go faster than Mach 1 (a DC-8 exceeded Mach 1 in a dive in the early 1960s to become the first supersonic commercial airliner, but this was done as a test flight and not in service). But the energy crisis hit in the 1970s and it was found that a lot of fuel could be saved by flying slower. With security and air traffic delays, most passengers didn’t notice, while more powerful engines allowed planes to climb to cruising altitudes faster which made up for some of that lost speed.
When the Concorde was introduced, there were no laptops, iPads, or in-flight internet. For the business traveler, the time in the air was 100% wasted time. So cutting the travel time in half was a huge advantage. Nowadays, that 6 hours in the air can be productive time with the availability of a laptop and the internet. So the demand for supersonic flights is much lower than it was in the 70s. This will likely make any future supersonic travel nothing more than a novelty for the extremely rich.
@teded is a perfect place to learn a new thing.....😊 I found it so effective because I could remember much of the information after watching the animation and the explanation. Great job 👏👏👏 Keep going...... We are ready to learn more and more ❤
Technology in general has been getting WORSE since the year 2000.Of course no corporation will ever admit that they have run out creative spirit.We are in the very late stages of society.
Mostly, there is one thing that has made commercial supersonic flight impossible, as well as keep flying uncomfortable, planes cramped to the rim: Oil. Oil is as expensive as it has ever been, thanks to the oil producers doing price fixing and not letting a open free market develop. Technology has advanced tremendously over the last 50 years, the oil price has gotten more expensive.
This was something I was thinking about recently. I already knew a little about the sound waves of a super sonic flight being too much, but this made me understand the whole situation very easily. The animation was beautiful as always ❤️
What on earth is surprising about a Sonic Boom? We have known about these, in practice, for the past 80 years. Concorde was noisy at even subsonic speeds, because of its engines. Surely the main problem about aircraft speeds is that to maintain a safe air traffic control system, all planes in a sequence have to be averaging the same speed, otherwise they are likely to have close encounters.
Pilot here. While I appreciate they are trying to stay "scientific" by using kilometers and liters, this is incorrect in the aviation industry (especially the US) and here is why. Aviation fuel is measured in pounds, not liters. Why? Because fuels volume expands and contracts with temperature, and the massive fuel tanks of airliners would fluctuate on hot and cold days, however, the weight remains the same. Aviation distance is measured in nautical miles, not kilometers. Why? Because nautical miles are a direct fraction between lines of latitude, allowing distances to be correlated to the coordinates of it's position and travel direction. Lastly (in the US) altitude is measured in feet. A CAT 1 ILS approach takes you to 200' above the surface. With tight margins in critical phases of flight, the accuracy of feet is more precise than meters or kilometers. Great video but I hope this clears up why the SI or metric system is great for many applications, but not always the best answer in every industry.
