Essentials of Supersonic Commercial Aircraft Conceptual Design

2The Challenges of High‐speed Flight

If the history of flight has shown us anything, it has shown us that aeronautics has always been paced by the concept of faster and higher. Although this has to be mitigated today by economically viable and environmentally safe airplanes, the overall march of progress in aeronautics will continue to be faster and higher.

John D. Anderson Jr. (2002)

The following global overview will describe several opportunities for starting a revival of the challenging branch of aeronautics that came to an unfortunate end with the cancellation of Concorde's operations in 2003. Using information from Concorde's development and recent design projects, a set of initial requirements for a next generation SCT will be proposed. In particular, it will be a crucial factor for the feasibility of any SCT development program that it is conceived and produced by a consortium of industrial participants and governmental institutes in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Although the unique achievements of the Concorde program justified sustained supersonic cruising from the technical and operational viewpoints during its lifetime (1976–2003), new organizational approaches will be mandatory to develop, produce, and operate second generation supersonic commercial transport (SCT) in the economic and regulatory environment of the twenty‐first century. Different from the early days in which the Concorde and the American SST projects were developed, the design team will ...