NASA appears to be pulling its SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest production plane ever made, out of retirement as the Trump administration teases its new line of hypersonic surveillance jets — but doubt…
Seeing Blackbird fly again after all these years would be incredible. I’d love to know what NASA has planned for it.
It was economically unviable and by now, woefully technologically outdated.
As a climate-conscious person, the concorde can stay exactly where it is ans never move again thank you. That thing burned several times as much kerosene as a standard plane for the same journey with less cargo space, etc
As cool as they are this is the truth. Once spy satellites began transmitting digital images (the first few used film and dropped capsules back to earth to be developed) the SR71 began obsolete and too risky to fly.
Now we have satellites that are constantly observing the “hot spots” around the planet which is safer than having pilots fly across enemy airspace.
My guess is NASA is using these to test supersonic attributes since they have tons of data on the SR71 and NASA is currently developing supersonic planes that don’t create sonic booms.
If they can get supersonic flight to be more fuel efficient, and avoid sonic booms (an active area of research for NASA’s X-59 project), and we develop manufacturing capacity for huge amounts of synthetic sustainable aviation fuel from CO2 and water and green energy, then maybe we’ll be at a place where supersonic commercial flights can be both economically feasible AND environmentally responsible. Probably not in my lifetime, but still something I expect to happen in the next century or so.
Yeah, the Concorde was interesting in that its design was optimized for cruising, so that taxiing, takeoff, and reaching cruise altitude/speed took a gargantuan amount of fuel compared to other aircraft and even to its own cruising efficiency.
I can see why someone could look at that and assume that they could do better with modern design principles, including the knowledge that planes need way more passenger seats to improve the per passenger efficiency.
Then again, the company that took the most concrete steps towards developing a supersonic engine pivoted to creating gas turbines for AI data centers (but was just dropped by its major customer on that, so who knows what they do next).
The original was already pretty packed (I visited it) and there’s a limit to how little leg room you can take away from someone paying concorde prices for a flight…
And keep in mind that many of the recent advances in planes revolve around high - bypass designs which only work subsonic if I’m not mistaken.
And before then, the concorde was already 3-4x more fuel per seat…
Yeah, I’m not an aerospace guy, but I’m wondering whether the maturity of the commerical passenger air travel industry has lessons to adopt for the 60 years since the Concorde was designed. The cabin and fuselage were so small that there’s not a lot of room for different seating configurations, the over-land speed restrictions limited its feasible routes.
I’m middle of the road when it comes to optimism about whether commercial supersonic flight will approach business class prices within the next 2 or 3 decades, and whether such a service could one day be environmentally equivalent to the 2026 impact of 2026 commerical air travel.
Plane are cool and I love them but seeing the hypocrisi of “conscious climate” ppl always rub me the wrong way. It s always so selective and so performative.
Hum actually I dont use supersonic flight transportation not cause they dont exist anymore but because I’m a conscious climate person
It was economically unviable and by now, woefully technologically outdated.
As a climate-conscious person, the concorde can stay exactly where it is ans never move again thank you. That thing burned several times as much kerosene as a standard plane for the same journey with less cargo space, etc
As cool as they are this is the truth. Once spy satellites began transmitting digital images (the first few used film and dropped capsules back to earth to be developed) the SR71 began obsolete and too risky to fly.
Now we have satellites that are constantly observing the “hot spots” around the planet which is safer than having pilots fly across enemy airspace.
My guess is NASA is using these to test supersonic attributes since they have tons of data on the SR71 and NASA is currently developing supersonic planes that don’t create sonic booms.
What’s interesting about supersonic flight is that there’s been some developments on making supersonic flight more fuel efficient.
The F-22’s big strategic advantage is that it can supercruise at Mach 1.5, without afterburners, and although the details are not publicly known, the publicly known facts suggest that it’s about 3x as fuel efficient as the other fighters in the US arsenal.
If they can get supersonic flight to be more fuel efficient, and avoid sonic booms (an active area of research for NASA’s X-59 project), and we develop manufacturing capacity for huge amounts of synthetic sustainable aviation fuel from CO2 and water and green energy, then maybe we’ll be at a place where supersonic commercial flights can be both economically feasible AND environmentally responsible. Probably not in my lifetime, but still something I expect to happen in the next century or so.
That’s a lot of ifs.
And for what it’s worth, the concorde had afterburner-free cruising. It needed them for takeoff only.
And keep in mind that fuel prices are much higher now than in the 90-00s.
Yeah, the Concorde was interesting in that its design was optimized for cruising, so that taxiing, takeoff, and reaching cruise altitude/speed took a gargantuan amount of fuel compared to other aircraft and even to its own cruising efficiency.
I can see why someone could look at that and assume that they could do better with modern design principles, including the knowledge that planes need way more passenger seats to improve the per passenger efficiency.
Then again, the company that took the most concrete steps towards developing a supersonic engine pivoted to creating gas turbines for AI data centers (but was just dropped by its major customer on that, so who knows what they do next).
The original was already pretty packed (I visited it) and there’s a limit to how little leg room you can take away from someone paying concorde prices for a flight…
And keep in mind that many of the recent advances in planes revolve around high - bypass designs which only work subsonic if I’m not mistaken.
And before then, the concorde was already 3-4x more fuel per seat…
Yeah, I’m not an aerospace guy, but I’m wondering whether the maturity of the commerical passenger air travel industry has lessons to adopt for the 60 years since the Concorde was designed. The cabin and fuselage were so small that there’s not a lot of room for different seating configurations, the over-land speed restrictions limited its feasible routes.
I’m middle of the road when it comes to optimism about whether commercial supersonic flight will approach business class prices within the next 2 or 3 decades, and whether such a service could one day be environmentally equivalent to the 2026 impact of 2026 commerical air travel.
As a climate conscious person plane is bad end of the line.
Plane as public transport system are bad. Plane as piece of engineering are cool.
Plane are cool and I love them but seeing the hypocrisi of “conscious climate” ppl always rub me the wrong way. It s always so selective and so performative. Hum actually I dont use supersonic flight transportation not cause they dont exist anymore but because I’m a conscious climate person