SST
SST: “civil aircraft for transporting passengers faster than the speed of sound.” Wikipedia
Two supersonic planes were thought of, two were built, the Concorde and the Tupolev Tu-144. Multiple planes of each were built but both had crashes. Air France’s Concorde crashed in France killing all on board. While the Tupolev crashed at the Paris Airshow in 1973 killing all six on board plus eight on the ground.
The Concorde, an SST, flew for a long time satisfying BA and Air France’s customers by cutting the flight time in half. After the Air France crash, all Concorde’s were grounded until nearly a year after. On the 10 of April 2003, BA and AF got together and announced that they would be ending their Concorde program and retiring all Concorde’s. They claimed that there were not many passengers after the 2000 crash, air travel had slowed since the 9/11 attacks, and the rise in maintenance.
The Tupolev Tu-144 was another SST which was flown once by Aeroflot. A total of 16 Tu-144 were built with a seventeenth on the way when production was cancelled.
The most bought airplane, the Boeing 737, reaches a maximum speed of 943 kilometers per hour, while the speed of sound is at 1230. If you wonder why planes cannot achieve another 300 kilometers, the answer is that the plane becomes a lot harder and more expensive to maintain. Not only that, but the oil consumption rises sharply.
Nobody knows when the next commercial SST will be built but when it does, people will be expecting something big with no crashes and reliable services. Who will build it? We don’t know. When will it be built? We don’t know that either, but when it is built it will probably be very popular.
A Concorde video
The Concorde breaking the sound barrier
This I just thought was funny
April 29th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
With the rising cost of oil and the concern for global warming, I doubt that an SST’s will be built again soon given their fuel requirements and extensive pollution. Unless an alternative fuel to oil is invented by the nations of this world innovation will surely suffer in the years to come.