The miracle of flight has grown stale. Our great grandparents may have been impressed by the ability to travel from New York to Los Angeles in five hours, but today, we're less than excited to spend that much time cramped in a 737.
Lockheed Martin is now working on an aircraft for commercial airlines that would make that trip much shorter.
The N+2 jet would cut the time spent traveling across the United States in half, from five hours to two and a half, and would seat 80 passengers.
One challenge the Lockheed Martin engineers are facing is building a craft that can travel at supersonic speeds but not make sonic booms, which are created by objects traveling faster than 760 miles per hour, the speed of sound. The N+2 has one engine on the topside of the craft, and two under the wings, in a configuration designed to reduce noise.
"To achieve revolutionary reductions in supersonic transportation airport noise, a totally new kind of propulsion system is being developed," Michael Buonanno, Lockheed Martin's manager of the NASA N+2 program, told the Daily Mail. "We are also exploring new techniques for low noise jet exhaust, integrated fan noise suppression, airframe noise suppression and computer customized airport noise abatement."
Lockheed isn't the only company developing supersonic aviation. Airbus is working with aerospace firm Aerion to create a jet that would make the trip from London to New York in three hours; a trip from Los Angeles to Tokyo could potentially take only six hours.
Earlier this year, Aerion revealed plans for its first supersonic business jet.
Although the Aerion AS2 business jet would fly much faster than a typical commercial airliner (1,217 miles per hour), it wouldn't fly as fast as the Concorde (1,350 miles per hour).
The last Concorde was retired in 2003. Operating the Concorde was an economic loss for the airlines that took it on, and the downturn in the aviation industry around the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 led to the decision to retire it.
It remains to be seen whether or not the new supersonic jets would succeed where the Concorde failed.
Contributed by Jessica Plautz, mashable.com
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