NASA's X-59 aircraft rekindles hopes for commercial supersonic air travel

Move over Concorde, the world’s fastest commercial aircraft, which set many records in air travel when it was introduced some 20 years ago. The aviation industry is gearing to welcome an era of ultrafast air travel with NASA coming up with the X-59, dubbed the 'Son of Concorde', an experimental supersonic aircraft good to go for its first test flight.

The X-59, although smaller and slower than Concorde, boasts of a maximum speed of almost 1,500 kph and is estimated to cut travel time from New York to London by around 3 hours and 30 minutes.

Latest research by Britain's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) claims that by the year 2033, a flight from London to Sydney, which as of now requires 22 hours, could be decreased to only two hours.

Suborbital flights would employ rockets, quite similar to Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic jet programme. These flights would ferry passengers at a surprising speed of 3500 miles per hour (5632 kph) resulting in the saving of so much time. For example, an individual can go from New York to Shanghai in a short time, rather than the ongoing 15-hour drive. A trip from New York to London, for instance, can be finished within an hour.

X-59 is equipped with ‘Quiet Supersonic Technology' which is designed to turn the sonic boom brought about by breaking the sound wall into a 'sonic thump'. When the aircraft is ready for flight, the single-seat X-59 will be barely short of 100 feet (30.5m) long, with a hard-swept wingspan of just 29.5 feet (9m) and a height of only 14 feet (4.25 meters). It will cruise at 55,000 feet and will have a cruising speed of Mach 1.4.