The Independent - President Donald Trump has ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to scrap a longstanding ban on supersonic air travel across the U.S. and replace it with a to-be-determined set of regulations that will allow faster-than-sound travel so long as the sonic booms it creates do not breach certain noise limitations.
In an executive order signed on Friday, Trump directed the FAA administrator to begin the process of repealing a section of the Code of Federal Regulations that prohibits anyone in the United States from flying a civilian aircraft “at a true flight Mach number greater than 1.”
That regulation was imposed in April 1973, at a time when the British and French governments were jointly developing Concorde, a supersonic airliner that had a cruising speed in excess of Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound.
NASA is also developing a quiet supersonic jet in order to replace the dreams of the Concorde with one that is significantly less deafening to the people down below. The supersonic passenger plane, called the X-59 aims to fly faster than the speed of sound, at almost twice as fast as the Concorde. Engineers are aiming to reduce the sound of the typical sonic boom to a ‘sonic thump’.
No comments:
Post a Comment