boeing super sonic airliner

On New Year's Eve 1966, after more than 14 years of study, design work and competition, the federal government selected Boeing to build the prototype for the country's first supersonic transport (SST).

Twenty-six airlines ordered 122 of the transports. The final design featured a double-jointed, needle-shaped nose that would drop during takeoff and landing for improved pilot visibility.

Government funding was withdrawn in 1971 before the prototype was finished. However, the Boeing SST fostered advances in supersonic transportation, leading to the High Speed Civil Transport project.

boeing

was just watching planes that never flew on wings
if they had sorted out the wight issue would it have been a success? or fall like the concorde after years of service?

I think it was canceled since it had the same problems as the Concorde ... used too much gas, was too expensive, was too loud, etc.

It was never going to be a success - the design spec was far too ambitious.


They wanted a cruising speed of Mach 2.5+ IIRC - which was too hot for aluminium - cue expensive exotic materials, or heavy ones.

They also wanted it to be bigger and fly farther than concorde as well as being faster - again, imposing more problems for the engineers.



Anyway, even if all the technical problems had been overcome [which was near impossible!], it would still have been scuppered by the same thing that killed concorde, the ban on supersonic flight overland.

Looks very similar to concorde,
Any design collaboration i wonder.

Nice specs:

Cruising speed: Mach 2.7
Altitude: More than 60,000 feet

I think Boeing is kind of looking at a new SST with the U.S. gov't on the side, considering all the technological advances and new composite materials available since this and the Concorde were designed, but I don't think any progress has been made to turn this into a serious effort to build a real production plane.

The cost factor and containing the noise are the toughest issues. No one wants to hear sonic booms all the time and very few people are willing to pay like 5 - 10 times as much money to get to their destination like 2 - 3x faster.

Intresting,
You know NOVA on MPT had a special on supersonic transports a while back. I remember them talking about the US SST program and the concerns that did it in. I must say, I'm a bit surprised at the layout though. For some reason, I remember the one on NOVA having swing wings similar to the B-1. The mockup in the photo is a delta wing. Intresting!

Tim

That was the initial design Tim. The Boeing swing wing SST was first schemed under the designation Boeing 733 before it metamorphosised into the Boeing 2707, by which name it is more commonly known. The original Boeing 733 was accepted for further development in 1966 and a year later it was redesigned with canards and a fuselage stretch which would have made it a staggering 318ft long, and people say the A380 is too big!

during 1969-70 Boeing admitted that the whole scheme was ridiculous as the weight and complexity inherent in a 300ft swing wing airliner was bound to be enormous and the lighter and simpler delta version shown in the picture above replaced it. This was called the Boeing 2707-300 despite being a completely new design.

The trouble was that, under instruction from the Govt, they were still required to make the American SST much bigger and faster than Concorde (even though Concordes size and speed had been decided upon for perfectly legitimate technical reasons) just for the hell of it. This is what doomed the Boeing SST to failure.

Subsequent claims, by more than a few, that Boeing were cleverer than the Europeans in that they recognized the economic realities of SST's and ditched the 2707 to go with the 747 instead are actually complete bull as the situation with fuel prices that made *any* SST uneconomical occurred in 1973, well after the 2707 was cancelled and Boeing had, in fact, originally intended to produce BOTH the 2707 and the 747 side by side, as any glance at the 1968-69 Jane's, featuring large three views of both models on facing pages, will demonstrate.

Thanks for the full update. I haven't really been following the SST's history.

Tim

You're welcome. I have no doubt that if Boeing had been allowed to decide just what sort of SST was achievable then an American answer to Concorde would have been successfully created, however there was this silly pressure from above to 'outdo' the Concorde at any price.

A visual symptom of this, if feel, is the droop nose mechanism. Unlike the Concorde's nose, the Boeing one was hinged in two places, first drooping down to improve visibility, just like Concorde, but then bending back up at the end to improve ground clearance on landing, giving it an elongated S shape. I'm sure that given the size of the 2707 this was genuinely felt necessary but it just seems to illustrate the desire to make things bigger and more complicated than what 'the other lot' were doing.

Of course if Boeing HAD created their own SST on their own terms it would have suffered the same fate as ours did in terms of being unsaleable, so it worked out alright in the end.

[edit on 14-11-2006 by waynos]

Could be wrong but seems to me Russia's TU144 was borrowed by NASA and Boeing for it's design specs (apparently a flop due to KGB spies being given (easy theft) bad blue prints back then), I think NASA has one TU144 redone and flying?

Thought Boeing is putting their design efforts toward the "luxury Liner". Not at all sure though.

Dallas

Yes, it wasn't so much 'borrowed' as a joint programme between NASA, Boeing and Tupolev following an agreement signed in 1993.

A lot of people questioned why the failed Tu-144 was used instead of the only successfull SST ever to enter service, Concorde of course. With Boeings involvement in the research and the fact that Concorde now comes under the Airbus umbrella, then answer to that isn't too hard to work out.

I don't think the Tu-144's failure had anything to do with the KGB being fed dodgy specs, I'm sure Tupolev were quite capable of failing on their own

By this of course I mean that if Tupolev were incapable of identifying and rectifying false data then they could never have produced a successful SST anyway, making the excercise pointless. If on the other hand they *would* have succeeded by their own efforts then they would have recognised and weeded out the false information, also making the excercise pointless. Therefore I don't think it happened.

[edit on 14-11-2006 by waynos]

Originally posted by Dallas
Could be wrong but seems to me Russia's TU144 was borrowed by NASA and Boeing for it's design specs (apparently a flop due to KGB spies being given (easy theft) bad blue prints back then),
Dallas

The KGB was a world renound spy agency during the Cold War. The SST was Not even a secret program. It's not like Counterintelligence would have committed vas resources to hide it from the USSR. If they were anything in set up like the CIA, The KGB had it's own scientists on staff. If the KGB couldn't find a single scientist in all of Russia who could tell if there was a tecnical flaw in a design and figure out how to correct it, they weren't deserving of their world class reputation!

Tim

I'd rather travel in sub sonic flights simply due to safty reasons.

[edit on 11/14/2006 by warset]

Except that every single person who was ever harmed or killed whilst flying in a civil aeroplane did so whilst flying subsonically, even with 26 years of Concorde operations included.

Just to add to the discussion o Boeings supersonic aircraft, when Boeing proposed the Sonic Cruiser, it said that if Airlines wanted the SS could go Mach 1+

Of course it never happened but it would have been nice...

yes Carch, I always thought the Sonic Cruiser would have made a great stepping stone towards making a new generation SST practical and acceptable, it already has the look of an SST, although I think the bloke who asked of my Sonic Cruiser model (complete with 'Boeing' logo on it) ''Is that Concorde?'' needs to go and buy some new glasses

The sonic cruiser was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard of!

I have absolutely no idea why any of the Boeing engineers never stopped the marketing people [the idea MUST have come from them] and told them to get a grip.

A typical graph of drag coefficient versus mach number.




Why, oh why would you want to take the hit on the drag rise for very marginal speed gains?

I thought the unusual shape was a way to try and avoid or minimise this? Which also reminds me, is there a clear and definable line of descent from the Vari-Eze to the Sonic Cruiser via the Beech Starship, or is it a coincidence?

It will be to try and minimise it - but that doesn't mean its not significant.


Lets face it, if it was easy, every large aircraft would have already done it.

Originally posted by kilcoo316
It will be to try and minimise it - but that doesn't mean its not significant.


Lets face it, if it was easy, every large aircraft would have already done it.

Oh yes, I agree there. If all the sums had worked out there would never have been a 787 and Airbus would be showing Sonic Cruiser-a-likes to every airline on its books.