NASA Is Bringing Supersonic Planes BACK

My Concorde story: I flew a Cessna 172 into JFK twice about 30 years ago. On one of those flights while on base leg to 13R, I heard a controller instruct an Air France Concorde to hold short for landing traffic. Sure enough, there it was on the taxiway at one o'clock. I was mildly amused by the thought of all those very fast rich people waiting an extra minute for me to land my little four banger. I did my best to make it short and quick, using about one-tenth of the runway to hop off to the GA terminal on the left. Just courtesy. Fond memory.

If NASA gets this right, I’m sure this video will blow up in a decade and if it does, it will be well deserved Cleo!

Turns out the new Top Gun was just a marketing campaign from NASA.

As a speed freak, I flew on it in 1992 and also travelled on the speed trains in Japan and China. From concorde, the height above sea level was more impressive than the actual speed.

The Concord had a second noisy characteristic. At takeoff, it was three or four times louder than any other plane. From a house in Somerville, Mass,, where you never hear the planes taking off and landing at Logan, The morning of the Concord's grand tour before beginning service,, the roar as it headed down he runway , even as far away as Davis Square, was stunning !! It sounded like I was standing at the end of the runway, not six miles away in town. Loud, really loud.

That personal anecdote at the end got me tearing up in a public library...such a heart warming story. I love the optimistic note you put in all your videos Cleo :)

Any day you can make Legos a tax write-off is a good day

Cleo, it is very important to add that Gulftream Aerospace, a US based company, had partnered with NASA to develop Quiet Spike. This led to the aircraft you are looking at in this video. This has been in development since around 2006.

3.5 hours from NYC to London? How do we get these planes in production faster? 👀

1:50 A correction and an important clarification. 1) The fastest train, the maglev Chuo Shinkansen, operates at 505 km/h but has reached 603 km/h in testing. The fastest wheeled train was a French TGV that reached 575 km/h. 2) The speed of sound depends on the temperature of the of air. The colder it is, the lower the speed of sound is. At 20 °C the speed of sound in air is 1235.556 km/h. This is why if you divide the Concorde's top speed of 2172 km/h by Mach 2.04 you only get 1064.7 km/h: it travelled at just over twice the speed of sound, but it did so way up in the lower stratosphere where the air temperature is -56 °C.

I worked at Cessna from 1999 to 2014. There ALREADY EXITS the potential for supersonic passenger flights in the US. Your flight covers a longer distance, over the ocean. Examples: Miami to NYC, but curving out over the Atlantic. Also, San Diego to Vancover (over the Pacific) Lastly, longer transoceanic routes. The problem is the engines needed for supersonic flight are VERY loud (low bypass ratio). The exhaust gases have to be capable of greater speed than the airframe. They are loud (DEAFENING) on takeoff.

The Concord was terrifically inefficient at sub-sonic speeds due to its wing design. The swept-back design is optimal for supersonic travel, but not helpful when the vehicle is any slower than that. Some cool ideas have gone over wings that can move out and back, and even a really interesting single-wing rotating design that throws symmetry out the window. I'm very excited to see the wacky wild planes of the future.

"Hmmmm... how can I buy more LEGO sets, yet write them off as a business expense? A-HA!" 😂 Great video, as usual. Thanks for covering this! (Also, I love the symmetry of you carrying your granpa's NASA pin, then you getting one of your own. I'm sure he's looking down and smiling.)

I have an uncle who was lucky enough to ride the Concord multiple times. To this day he still talks about the view out the window. Great video Cleo!

This was wonderful. I used to do a lot of public speaking on going through the problems of life and comparing it with breaking the sound barrier. I was given a ride through the sound barrier in a Kansas Air National Guard F-105 Thunderchief and later in an F-4 Phantom. I later wrote a paper titled, “Faster Than A Speeding Bullet.” Your video brought back some wonderful memories. Thanks for posting!

Congratulations on getting to see that plane under development! 🎉 Thanks for bringing us along!

I worked in Twickenham near Heathrow Airport in the 1990's. Concorde flew twice daily to JFK, London. The first left at 10.30 each morning, flying directly overhead. What an utterly beautiful plane it was in flight. Like nothing else on Earth.

I think one of the reasons Cleo's videos are so great is because she approaches topics with a child-like curiosity that we all wished we still had, and through these videos we get to experience it for a while. Thank you so much :face-red-heart-shape:

I think that’s great that NASA is doing this, I hope they share this information with Airbus so we have a rollout much faster than we would with Boeing. I’m 62 and if Boeing has anything to do with it, we won’t see this aircraft manifest itself until 2040.

This video managed to land perfectly into my page! This was definitely one of my favorite videos so far. Keep it up!