NASA Is Bringing Supersonic Planes BACK

[Ticking] "On the world's first ever supersonic commercial flight, the most exciting aircraft the world had ever seen, twice  the speed of sound..." "5... 4... 3... 2... 1..." This is a one-of-a-kind supersonic plane. Wait, hold on, we got to go back. 20 years ago, you could fly in a plane going faster than sound. Why  can't you do that now? This supersonic plane, the Concorde, could get from New York to  London in 3 and 1/2 hours. And it was so cool... It flew at an altitude so high you could see the curve of the Earth, all while popping champagne. But then, that all changed... "The Concorde is no more!" "Concorde will never take to the skies again" These planes stopped flying and we never  made any more like them. Today, New York to London takes 7 hours. But why? What happened to supersonic planes? And more importantly... Can we bring them BACK? If you ask NASA, the answer is yes. We  got to go see their brand new experimental supersonic plane that they're building. Here's  what's really huge if true: If NASA succeeds they could bring back commercial supersonic  flight, allowing you and me to fly faster than sound. "Supersonic" "Supersonic!" "Supersonic airplanes" [BOOM BOOM] "X-59" "a new supersonic airliner -" "twice as fast as current airliners - " "twice the speed of sound -" "you're going faster than the Earth rotates!" "it's the only way to cross the Atlantic" "So we're now going supersonic? "Yep!" "You ready?" "I'm ready" "Let's do this. Let's go see a supersonic plane!" When we say supersonic, I know it's faster  than sound, but exactly how fast are we talking? For comparison, the world's fastest train can  go around 286 mph. The fastest car goes around 330. Your average Boeing 737 today will cruise at  around 520 mph. And once you reach around 767 mph you're at the speed of sound also called  Mach 1. The Concorde? It went 1,350 mph. For reference that's roughly the same top speed  as a military F-16 fighter jet today! And now, 20 years after the Concorde's last flight, NASA  is trying to build a new supersonic plane and we're on our way to go see it... We have entered the land of the planes. And the weird short palm trees... Let's do it. We're here at Skunkworks where  Lockheed Martin is building a supersonic plane for NASA. This plane is really cool. There aren't that  many images of it online, it's possible that we're like one of the only teams to ever see it, which  makes me feel awesome. I kind of can't believe that we got this shoot if I'm honest, because we just  emailed NASA and we were like "hey, we know you're working on this supersonic plane, is there any  chance that we can come see it?" and they said yes! But there was this very long security clearance  process and then we got this email just a couple weeks ago, you're allowed to come visit on this  day for these two hours, so here we are! Is that the plane? This is it! This is the X-59. This plane is beautiful. And weird-looking! In order to understand what NASA's building here,  you need to understand how a supersonic plane actually works, and the best way to do that is is  obviously Legos. I'm just going to try to fit Legos into as many episodes as possible, okay? This Lego  set is of the original Concorde and it's a plane was just the physical embodiment of a simple fact  about our species which is that humans just love... speed. What's this? Oh my there are more in here... Look how thick this instruction book is. 545 pages long. What have I gotten myself into. So in the  1960's when the Concorde was originally designed, passenger planes looked pretty similar to what  they look like today. But the Concorde look like this! "The shape still looks futuristic. It  still looks like every child's paper dart." That's Captain Mike Bannister, the former Chief Concorde Pilot at British Airways. "I flew a total of 22 years. Flying Concorde was an absolute  joy. You are flying something that's traveling at 23 miles a minute, on the edge of space where the sky  got darker, where you could see the curvature of the earth. You're traveling so quickly that you're  going faster than the Earth rotates. And when you got close to her, you could see the elegance in design..." Now I gotta actually build this thing... [LEGO ASMR] [PLANE WHISTLE] Look it's coming together! You can see  some of the features on it already. This plane had a long narrow body to streamline air  resistance, it had these very wide delta-shaped wings to generate lift. It had this funny long  nose called the droop snoot that drooped upon takeoff and landing so that the pilots could see... [PURE JOY] See that? And special powerful engines that could handle the rapid incoming air. Even special paint that discharged heat. And the price to go this fast wasn't cheap! And tons of people paid lots of money  to experience the thrill of riding supersonic But once you hit the speed of sound, something happens... [SONIC BOOM] Let me play that again: [SONIC BOOMS] "Folks are aware that supersonic aircraft make a sonic boom, which we as human beings do hear as a double bang, buh-boom..." If you listen carefully you can hear that  double boom: [BOOM BOOM] Alright, I need to spend some time building... As the plane flies, it pushes air  out of its path creating pressure waves at the front and back of the plane. When a plane flies  faster than the speed of sound, the air molecules literally cannot move out of the way in time, "and  so they get compressed together, they form a wave off the front of the airplane and a second wave  off the back." When those pressure waves reach our ears our brains process them as sound. A massive  BOOM. But a common misconception is that a sonic boom doesn't just boom once when the plane hits  that speed. It booooooooms the whole time all along the path of the plane, carpeting the ground below  it, meaning everyone under the flight of the plane hears the sonic booooom. Weirdly though, inside the plane, you don't hear the boom at all. "There was no indication whatsoever physically on the  airplane of going through the sound barrier. You're traveling as fast as the pressure waves are. We put  an indicator in the cabin so the customers knew when they were going through the sound barrier  because otherwise they wouldn't have done." "We're coming up to twice the speed of sound!" But for those on the ground, the boom was loud. For context if this is how loud distant thunder is, and this  is how loud a hand clap is, and the firework this is how loud the Concorde sonic boom was from  the ground. Just below a balloon pop. Because of how loud supersonic booms are, in 1973 the FAA changed  their rules and banned commercial supersonic flights over the United States and similar  rules followed around the world. This meant that companies could mostly only offer flights over the  ocean which dramatically reduced their routes, plus these fuel guzzling engines and rising fuel costs,  combined with a deadly crash in 2000, hurt public reception of supersonic flight and finally Air  France chose to stop flying the Concorde, eventually forcing British Airways the only company now  paying for the upkeep of the aging planes to stop flying them as well. "And so in early 2003 on  April the 10th British Airways very reluctantly announced that they were retiring their Concorde  fleet and on the very last flight we invited 100 people at British Airways' expense to join us on  that last flight and getting the message across that this was something that they should really  be proud to have been part of." The Concorde was ahead of its time but even as advanced as it was  it couldn't overcome the problem of the sonic boom. But what if... we could fix that? That is what NASA  is trying to do. I'm going to keep building but let me show you something: Okay this is my privacy  dashboard. This shows how many data brokers I've gotten myself removed from or rather Incogni has  gotten me removed from, I didn't do anything except sign up. But what are data brokers and why do I  want to get removed from them? Well they make money buying and selling your information and the reason  that I care about that is that with enough data points these data brokers can form a picture of  you, a "shadow profile," that they can then sell for things that you might not necessarily want like  to assess you for insurance or banking but Incogni can force many of them to remove you. They reach  out to data Brokers and they say hey remove this person and then crucially they follow up to make  sure that you actually got removed. If you want to try this out go to the link in my description  or go to Incogni dot com slash Cleo Abram. Now, back to the story... The X-59 is NASA's attempt at fixing the  boom problem. It's a single-seater jet that can travel at 925 mph or 1.4 times the speed of sound  and it's specifically engineered to prove that supersonic planes can be quiet. That's Cathy Bahm,  the NASA lead on this effort, and these are the leads from Lockheed Martin, Dave Richards and Mike  Buonanno. "Our goal is to change that regulation so that it's, as long as you are below this sound  level then you can fly supersonically over land." To achieve this goal, NASA reference design features  found on the Concorde, including those large delta wings, the very streamlined body, and that narrow  nose. But the nose on the X-59 is much longer. "There's no way you can miss our 38 ft nose!" Unlike  the Concorde, this 38 ft carbon fiber nose doesn't move, which means the pilot can't see out the front  during takeoff and landing. Instead they've built a camera at the front that sends a live video feed  to the the pilot. But once in the air, this nose is key to reducing the sonic boom. "I liken it to, you've done a cannonball into a swimming pool and what we want to do here is, that splash  that you make is like the sonic boom and we want to make that splash or that sound as as small as  possible." Then NASA wants to send as much of the remaining boom as possible up, away from people.  "If you look at the bottom of the airplane, it's very very smooth and clean so that anything that  would create a bump or anything like that that makes a shock that would go down, they're all on  the top, and they go up." Any remaining supersonic boom that's still going down, they're going to try  to cancel it out. "When you jump into the pool doing that that cannon ball, the biggest splash is when  all the water comes back together, and so there is a big shock on the back end of the airplane." This  feature called a T-tail creates its own shock that interacts with that boom, cancelling some of it out. By the way, I still can't believe that I got to see that plane up close. Normally, that is really  not allowed. "How many people have been allowed to be this close to this plane?" "Well in the state that it's in  right now, you're actually the first! I'm going to get fired but yeah you guys are the first ones  to come in." "You're not actually going to get fired? "No but I already got yelled at." "So  there's no way I can sit in -" "Nope." "That seems fair, I pushed it enough." If NASA can help change  the rule preventing supersonic over land, that can help everybody. It can open the floodgates to  more companies and more planes. There are a bunch of private companies, including one called  Boom, fighting to bring back these planes. And the pressure is on. It was very clear talking to this  team that there's a lot on the line with this plane. "You know this takes a long time to develop and  there's a lot of money in the development of it. To see something from a concept drawn  on a napkin to having the airplane here and then to fly it, it is a lot of hard work. Really this is  our one opportunity to try to repeal the law. This is our one chance to get it right." So in order to  change the rule that limits supersonic flight, they had to design the X-59 to have a sonic boom that's  quiet enough to not disrupt everyday life. But how quiet is that exactly? "The answer to that question  is that no one exactly knows right now, and that's the entire reason why we had to build X-59 and  why NASA plans on flying it over the next several years." NASA is anticipating that 75 perceived level  DB will be sufficiently quiet enough so that's the goal that they're aiming for right now. "The result  of that is that it would sound kind of like your neighbor closing their car door in front of  their house but most of the time you won't even hear it at all." This plane is just amazing. Every bolt, rivet, and tiny little winglet has been placed specifically to optimize aerodynamics  and speed, all the way down to the paint. "It has a very special anti-static paint. So you know how you  walk along and you get static from the carpet? Well the carpet is like the air. As the airplane moves  through the air it generates static electricity on the airplane, so we have a special paint that's  like putting Teflon on your shoes, so that you don't build that static charge." But it's  clear this is not a passenger plane. "Yeah we're not going to build any more of these. This is a  one-off airplane, it's very dedicated to just this one demonstration, to show that we can make an an  airplane that is capable of a low boom supersonic flight." So NASA's building their supersonic plane  in the hopes that the breakthroughs that they make are one day going to be able to be translated  into commercial passenger supersonic planes that can carry more people... but when?When are you  and I going to get to fly in one? When is passenger supersonic flight finally coming back? "Not soon  enough in my book! But first we'll go through the regulation process. That'll take a number of  years to test this aircraft, then go to test the communities, and then go through the regulation  process." So it looks like we're at least a decade away from seeing these planes, and claims from  companies like Boom echo that. They've set a goal of bringing their planes to market by the end of  this decade. But the industry seems so confident that this is going to happen that three airlines  have already placed orders for their supersonic planes. Eighty years ago, we set out on a journey to  go faster than sound, because as humans we love going fast. We work so hard at it! We build these  beautiful machines that hurdle us through the air! Just imagine flying on a machine like this. It's  just so cool! But the promise of supersonic flight is much more than just being extremely cool. For  all of history, being able to go farther faster has meant greater connection. When our world shrinks  in size, it means that we as humans get to explore more of it. And today, we have an opportunity to  take another leap forward. It'll be our second try, but the good thing about that is we can fix what  we know went wrong. Allowing supersonic flights over land is just step one. New supersonic planes  need to be more sustainable. They can't guzzle fuel like they used to. They'll need to be cheaper.  They'll need to be able to hold more than just one passenger. But we can do this. "It's 20 years now  since Concord last flew and I really do believe there will be another supersonic airliner offering  supersonic travel to the general public in the not too distant future." "The future is so bright and  it's so achievable. I know that sounds like a cliche but you can see it!" "That's really exciting." "It really is." "Huge if true!" "Huge AND true." Okay, I want to show you one more thing. My  grandfather passed away a few years ago, and uh I miss him a lot and and he actually worked for  NASA in the 1960s and as we were going through his stuff we found this pin of his. I've been  keeping it close to me while I was researching this episode. And at the end of our visit to see  this plane, NASA gave me this! And so now I have my own pin and uh it just really means a lot  to me. So thanks for watching this episode and thank you so much to NASA. If you like optimistic  science and tech stories and you want to support us and our show, the best thing that you can  do is to subscribe. See you for the next one!