NASA Building The Future Of Aerospace

NASA has had many achievements but their newest achieved milestone includes creating a supersonic passenger jet that could travel over land. The quiet supersonic aircraft titled QueSST will begin test flights in 2020. The aircraft is labeled as quiet do to the fact that the fuselage is behind the cockpit, a rare configuration that has not been seen since the 1950’s. Flight demonstrations for the aircraft will begin in 2020n to evaluate how the fuselage placement technique effects sound. NASA also wants to conduct research to determine how humans will perceive the sound disruption the jet causes by breaking the sound barrier.

NASA wants to present this research to the Federal Aviation Administration by 2020 in hopes that they can persuade the agency to eliminate an ancient band. If successful the aircraft would cut flying time by more than half, making it a great alternative to commercial flying. So far NASA has performed 73 hours of testing the model of the plane, mostly in a wind tunnel. These laboratory tests were the first of its kind for such an engine inlet position for a supersonic aircraft. NASA who uses top of the line aviation parts, was very happy with the results of the test. Castner, and engineer at NASA stated, “This inlet is actually more efficient than I thought it would be, It was about 96-98% efficient, so that’s pretty good”.

NASA’s main concern was about the boundary layer flow over the top of the aircarft fuselage with the inlet’s placement. This concern overall drove all other main design concepts. The design is constructed to reduce the sonic boom disruption but to 75db on the ground compared to the current 105db that British aerospace has developed. To achieve a low boom disruption the design has also been altered on the outside of the supersonic jet. It featured and extra-long nose with extra front windows for piolet visibility and miniature T-tail atop the regular tail. All of NASA’s aerospace parts are top of the line and are forming some of the most remarkable aerospace technologies of our time.