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Im a pilot at zero four flight school in margate,currently studying for my commercial pilots licence. I really love muscle cars and hope to oneday own a 1967 mustang fastback,its also my dream to get into an international airline as the pilot in command.

29/02/2012

Boeings planned Jet to be Super-sonic

A generation after attempts to build a commercially successful supersonic jet ended in failure, the Boeing Company announced plans yesterday for a new airplane that would fly just shy of the speed of sound, or about 20 percent faster than today's jets.
The futuristic new twin-engine jet, which is being called the Sonic Cruiser or the 20XX, has a double delta-shaped wing somewhat reminiscent of the supersonic Concorde. But a horizontal stabilizer near the nose makes it look different from all of today's commercial passenger jets.
Boeing said the plane, which will seat 175 to 250 passengers, would fly at higher altitudes than conventional jets and save about one hour for every 3,000 miles it travels. That would shave about an hour off transcontinental flights in the United States and as many as three hours on flights from California to Europe.
The new airplane will not enter service until the end of the decade, Boeing said, and many of its design features must still be worked out. But it has already captured the imagination of industry experts.
could be cool,'' said Howard Rubel, an analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Company. ''It could change the game.''
For Boeing, the new jet is a surprise riposte to its archrival, Airbus Industrie, which has gained ground on Boeing in recent years and has also stolen the industry's coveted mantle of innovation with its development of a new 550-seat superjumbo jet called the A380.
Boeing had been trying to sell airlines on a stretched version of its 747 that would seat 522, compared with the 416 seats on the largest of today's 747's. But Boeing had not received any orders for the new jet, while Airbus has 66 orders for the A380.
Boeing said yesterday that it had decided to halt work on the larger 747 and instead focus on the new-generation Sonic Cruiser. ''This is the airplane our customers have asked us to concentrate on,'' Alan R. Mulally, the president of Boeing's commercial airplane division, said. ''They share our view that this new airplane could change the way the world flies as dramatically as did the introduction of the jet age.''
The announcement of a new jet, which Boeing said could expand into a family of fast jets, comes only a week after Boeing announced that it would move its headquarters out of Seattle, where it was founded 85 years ago and where it assembles all but one of its 16 passenger airplane models today.
That raised the question of whether Boeing would build the Sonic Cruiser in the Seattle area. Mr. Mulally said the decision would not be made for a few years and issued a not-so-subtle challenge to Boeing's combative unions.
''If we keep improving our competitiveness, we will earn the right to design and make it here,'' he said. ''The most important thing is that we keep pulling together to improve our productivity and competitiveness.''
The excitement surrounding a jet that does not even break the sound barrier reveals how little progress has been made in commercial aviation over the last 40 years. Passenger jets have not changed appreciably in terms of speed since Boeing introduced the 707 in the 1950's. Even the new A380, which Airbus is calling ''the flagship of the 21st Century,'' will fly no faster than today's jets, or about 85 percent of the speed of sound, which is around 700 miles per hour, depending on air temperature and altitude.
The technology exists to build a supersonic passenger jet like the Concorde, which entered commercial service in 1976 after the British and French governments essentially gave the airplanes to their two national airlines, Air France and British Airways, because no airline was willing to pay the high cost of buying them.
Until the Concorde was taken out of service last year after one crashed near Paris, the jets were only available to elite travelers paying extremely high prices.
Most experts agree that a new supersonic jet built today would still be too expensive for most airlines to operate. It also could not fly at top speed over land because of the noisy sonic boom and would fly so high that it would damage the ozone layer. Since the 1970's, the British, French, Russians and Boeing in the United States have abandoned efforts to build a civilian supersonic transport.
Mr. Mulally said the exciting thing about the Sonic Cruiser was that it could be built with conventional materials and be powered by the same engines now used on Boeing's wide-body 777. Even though it will fly faster, he said, it will still have about the same operating costs as today's jets.
Advances in computer design and manufacturing also mean that Boeing can save money developing the plane and on each copy that it makes. Mr. Mulally would not say how much the new jet would cost to develop but analysts have estimated $9 billion to $10 billion, about what Airbus plans to spend on the A380. The cost of developing the stretched version of the 30-year-old 747 was $4 billion.
''The 20XX is more than just a new fuselage and internal configuration,'' Mr. Rubel said. ''It's a whole new way of making airplanes.''
The new jet also underscores the two opposing views of the future of air travel espoused by Boeing and Airbus. Boeing has argued that a very large aircraft like the A380 has only a limited market because more travelers are bypassing large hub airports and flying directly to their destinations in smaller long-range jets like its 777. A very fast 200-seat long-range jet like the Sonic Cruiser will serve this market well.
Airbus acknowledges that air travel is fragmenting but counters that the inexorable growth in the global number of passengers over the next 20 years will require a larger plane on popular routes like New York to London and London to Tokyo.
Asked about the new Boeing design at a meeting with analysts in Manhattan yesterday, John Leahy, the commercial director of Airbus, responded much the way Boeing has responded to the A380 over the last five years. ''We've looked at that,'' he said. ''I don't think it is a very big market.''
One of the more intriguing questions that experts disagreed on was whether the new Sonic Cruiser would compete with the new Airbus superjumbo.
Byron K. Callan, an aerospace analyst at Merrill Lynch & Company in New York, said that given the choice between flying the A380 across the Pacific and saving several hours on the new Boeing jet, most premium business travelers, which are coveted by the world's airlines, would flock to the faster airplane. ''It is a category killer for the A380,'' he said.

But Steve Binder, an analyst at Bear, Stearns & Company, who was the first to disclose the existence of the new Boeing airplane to his clients last week, said that it was more of a replacement for the Boeing 767, which has been outsold by the Airbus A330 recently. ''This is a totally different market,'' he said.

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